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DISCOURSE 



THE TRUE NATURE 



FKEEDOM AND SLAVERY. 



DELIVERED BEFORE 



THE WASHINGTON SOCIETY 



THE NEW JERUSALEM, 



IN VIEW OF THE 



ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTEENTH ANNIVERSARY 



WASHINCITON'S BIRTH. 



RICHARD DE CHARMS, 

AN ORDAINING JIINISTEK OF THE SEW JERUSALEM. 



PHILADELPHIA: . , 

J. H JONES, PRINTER, 21 CARTER'S ALLEY. 

1850. 



PREFACE 



Those who heard this discourse delivered, will hardly recognize it 
in its printed form. The author rarely speaks his sermons precisely 
as, he has written them. Influx is proportioned to efflux. Good or 
ill reception in an audience wonderfully opens or shuts up a public 
speaker's mind. And he has found new trains of thought suggested 
in the pulpit, which had never presented themselves in the study ; 
or written thoughts have widely expanded, or run in varied channels, 
in delivery; according to the auditory 's peculiar states of receptivity. 
In the present instance, he was led repeatedly into extemporaneous 
remarks, which, evaporating with the heat of somewhat fervid feeling, 
it has been impossible for him to recal in the cooler and calmer mo- 
ments of reflection since. Yet he has wished to present at least the 
substance of those extemporaneous remarks in the printed discourse : 
and as prolixity is not so objectionable in one that is to be read as in 
one that is spoken, he has greatly extended what he said in answer to 
the senatorial argument against african slavery in this country being 
an evil. He has also put in those parts of the written discourse which 
had to be omitted for want of time. And he has added a few bottom 
notes. Moreover, he has printed the discourse on pica instead of small 
pica type, as he proposed in his circular for subscriptions. These causes 
have a good deal swelled its size and altered its form ; but he trusts it 
will not be less acceptable on that account. 

Something may be said respecting the occasion for writing this dis- 
course. The author had been several times asked, by a most worthy 
and valued member of our church in South Carolina, for his opinion 
on the propriety of a Newchurchman's holding slaves and continuing 
to reside in a slave state in violation of conscientious scruples. This 
led him to canvass the subject of slavery in his own mind for a good 
while. Subsequently removing from Pennsylvania to Maryland, a 
slave state, and residing in Baltimore upwards of five years, he had 
his attention again called to this subject by further correspondence 
with his southern friend. And the w^ide-spread agitation of the slavery 
question during the few past years, splitting up as it did some of the 
leading denominations of the old christian church, and thus giving 
it an imposing ecclesiastical and religious aspect, made him feel it his 
duty to discourse on this subject to his own congregation. This ex- 
plains why he attempts to show the duty of Newchurchraen in regard 
to slavery. It also displays the reason of his w^ishing to show the 
true nature of freedom, and the essential and abiding influence which 
the principles of the new and true christian church, called the New 



IV PREFACE. 

Jerusalem, must exert for the perpetuity of our national existence and 
the preservation of our country's liberties. The discourse was written 
as a sermon and first preached in Baltimore, Sunday, March the 4th, 
1849. The writer, having to travel for his health in the autumn of 
last year, was providentially led, by a sort of lot, to preach this ser- 
mon in Lancaster, Penn., also, on Sunday the 16th of September last. 
And in his recent visit to Washington City, for the purpose of ordain- 
ing the Rev. Rufus Dawes into the first grade of our ministry, he was 
induced, by the present most momentous agitation of the slavery ques- 
tion in that city, to preach it the third time there. The debates in 
Congress, which he attended for about a week, so enlisted his thoughts 
and affections in the all-engrossing subject, that he felt constrained 
by an afflatus numine to discourse upon it. Indeed, on leaving Bal- 
timore, an internal dictate urged him to take this sermon with him, 
that he might have it at hand, if circumstances should indicate the 
duty or the propriety of its delivery. Circumstances did indicate 
both the duty and the propriety of this ; and it was delivered as a dis- 
course, a good deal altered or modified — some parts entirely re- 
written and others variously improvided — for the occasion. 

But why was it delivered in view of the anniversary of Washington's 
birth? We know now that the grand era of the establishment of 
all human freedom was the last judgment, which was effected in the 
world of spirits in 1757. We also know that, in the divine economy, 
civil and political freedom is first established on earth, as the plain or 
ground- work of spiritual and religious freedom. And we cannot 
doubt that the american revolution, and the independence of these 
United States, were an outbirth of the last judgment, and have desig- 
nated North America as a conspicuous field for the especial flourishing 
of a new and true church. Equally manifest is it that George Wash- 
ington was especially raised up as the agent of heaven, and his war 
sword was made heaven's especial representative instrument, in those 
battlings of true and false principles, by which arbitrary power was 
made to quail, human rights were asserted, and man's universal liberties 
established on a wide and all-enduring basis. Now, on the Thursday 
preceding the Sunday on which this discourse was delivered — that is, 
on the day preceding the 22d of February last, the recent anniversary 
of Washington's birth — the author visited the patent office building, 
and, lingering around the cabinet which exhibits to Americans certain 
most precious relics of the father of their country, saw, among other 
mementoes of his miUtary life, "Washington's War Sword." The 
scabbard of this, just under the hilt, has a silver ferrule with these 
initials and date coarsely engraved (perhaps by Washington's own 
hand) upon it — "G W 1757" None but a receiver of the writer's 
faith can conceive how his feeling-s thrilled at this slo;ht. Nor can 
any other imagme how this seemmgly superstitious circumstance, 
and the reflections to which it gave rise in his mind, should have 
almost wholly determined him, both to deliver this discourse in Wash- 
ington City, and to deliver it in commemoration of Washington's birth. 



A DISCOURSE 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY 



John, viii. 32-36. 

^'And ye shall know the truth; a7id the truth shall mahe 
you free. — — Whosoever committeth sin, is the sei'vant 
of sin. And the servant ahideth not in the house for 
ever : hut the son ahideth for ever. If the son, there- 
fore, shall make you free, ye shall he free iyideed.'^ 

There is no word in the great vocabulary of universal 
language which is so dear to the human heart ^^ freedom ! 
The cords of the soul which vibrate to its sound, go down 
the deepest, spread the widest, and thrill the longest. 
The amount of human suffering and endurance to which 
the love of it prompts, w^ould be utterly incredible, if the 
voice of history and all outward observation did not find 
an echo in the inmost recesses of every human breast — 
bearing incessant living testimony to the eternal truth. 



A D1.S( OIJKSE ON 



" Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also"! 
Certain it is, there is nothing for which all true men will 
peril more, or strive harder, than to gain their liberties or 
secure their rights. The very stuff of their immortal 
nature is woven, in every filament, from the fundamental 
principle, that " man is made to act in freedom according 
to reason." Hence, there is no subject more generally 
interesting than human freedom in contrast with human 
slavery. And yet there is hardly any subject, at the 
present time, wdiich seems to be so imperfectly understood. 
It cannot, therefore, be amiss in us, who are so proud of 
our political liberties, and profess to be so abhorrent of 
slavery, to discern rightly wdiat is the true nature of both, 
and, by all and every efficient means, secure the one and 
get rid of the other. And no occasion can be so appro- 
priate to the consideration of this subject, as the anniver- 
sary commemoration of that auspicious day which ushered 
into being the father of our country. For if ever, under 
Divine Providence, there was any mortal man entitled to 
stand forth, and be regarded, in all coming ages, as the 
peculiar type of civil and political freedom, or the great 
and wise advocate of all human enfranchisement, it was 
George Washington ! 

The Lord, in the text before us, most clearly indicates 
the source of both slavery and freedom. " Whosoever 
committeth sin is the servant of sin:" and ''if the son 
shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." The source 
of slavery is the commission of sin : the source of freedom 
is the practice of truth. 

It is a very common impression in the present day, that 
the holding of human beings in involuntary or forced 
bondage is sm. Few are disposed to deny that it is an 
evil. Until this last visit to Washington City we had 
imagined that there were not any so disposed. But we 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 7 

liave just heard it argued, in the senate of the United 
States, that african slavery is positively a civil and poli- 
tical blessing, and no evil at all. The argument is, that 
the African in our slave states is better clad and fed than 
he was or would have been in his native land, or than the 
poor Avhite man is in the northern states. If he is sick, 
his master affords him the best medical attendance ; and 
in the decrepitude of old age, he is comfortably provided 
with shelter, raiment and food, without taxing his off- 
spring with the heavy burden of his support. The Great 
Saviour has declared — as if to show a plain for the exer- 
cise of the highest christian virtues— " The ^joor ye have 
always with you." But a strong argument in favor of 
african slavery in this country now is, that it excludes 
all poverty, and all possibility of pauperism, in the South. 
We hear the exultation. There never was, there is not 
now, and there never will be such a thing as a poor neo-ro 
in that quarter of our country ! A glowing contrast is 
drawn between black slavery in the South and the white 
slavery which grinding poverty produces in the North : 
and it is triumphantly exclaimed, Such a thing as white 
girls laboring in a northern factory and laying by their 
earnings for the support and comfort of their aged mothers, 
was never heard of in the slave states ! True : and is 
filial piety, or maternal love, those most loved and lovely 
features of free, upright and godlike humanity, as promi- 
nent and beautiful in the black females of the South as 
in the white females of the North? How do the blacks 
compare with the whites of the South in this respect ? 
Are slave mothers more remarkable for maternal tender- 
ness, or slave daughters for filial assiduity ? Nay, is it not 
the greatest evil of slavery that it mars true humanity in 
the subjects of it? All human virtues are developed 
and strengthened by exercise. Human virtue, like the 



A DISCOURSE ON 



best steel, takes on the brightest polish from the hardest 
friction of contrary substance. Nor can there be any 
other satisfactory reason assigned why a good and mer- 
ciful God should permit poverty, sickness, pain, misery, 
or any other form of natural evil, to exist, but that it is 
the sole and indispensable means of working out, by the 
healthful exercising of its affliction, that " far more ex- 
ceeding weight of glory" which shines from the most 
resplendent spiritual virtues. 

Suppose we grant, then, for argument, that the poor 
double-tasked hard-working white factory girl is in a less 
desirable physical condition — which is by no means "un- 
questionable— than the fat glistening tow or linsey clad 
and pork and corn fed negro, yet the latter cannot possi- 
bly have so perfectly formed in him those sweet and 
lovely features of humanity which become prominent in 
the bolder relief of the more fully developed filial and 
maternal affections. As you know, we once visited a 
city of South Carolina to institute a society of our church 
there. While in Charleston, we learned that the little 
neo-roes are much addicted to eatins; dirt. This habit 
generates a disease which is very fatal to them. And, 
much to our astonishment, we were credibly informed, 
that, if the whites did not give their own most assiduous 
personal care and attention to these little negroes, they 
would inevitably die from neglect of their black mothers! 
To such a des^ree do the maternal affections seem to have 
been blunted by slavery in the South ! And as to the mo- 
tive which most strongly prompts the whites to take care 
of their slaves in this case, we may see it in the words of 
our informant — "We are obliged to do it, sir, to preserve 
our property ! " Doubtless, many slaveholders, under the 
influences of the christian religion, do perform acts of 
kindness to their slaves from higher ])rinciples than this. 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 9 

But forced bondage is not an institution of pure Chris- 
tianity. This was a misty cloud, hanging- densely and 
dankly over the fair face of nature, w^hich " the Sun of 
Righteousness, v^^ith healing in his wings," arose to dis- 
perse. The service of the Lord is perfect freedom. The 
service of man is constrained obeisance to arbitary self- 
will. And the influences of Christianity upon slavehold- 
ers, therefore, are rainbow tints of spiritual grace pro- 
jected on a dark cloud of natural passion. In short, 
slavery is an institution of the natural man, who is go- 
verned by the loves of exercising power and possessing 
wealth. In the activity of the former of these passions, 
one portion of the human race are made slaves to another ; 
and in the activity of the latter, the slaves are taken care 
of from cupidity rather than benevolence. 

It was our own good or bad fortune to live some six years 
in a slave state, and we are not wholly wanting in that 
knowledge of the institution of slavery, which personal 
observation and experience of its nature and tendencies 
afford. Now no observation is more common than that 
the masters suffer constant anxiety on account of the great 
carelessness of their slaves in taking care of their own 
health. They have no sole interest in the fruits of their 
own labor. The ordinary impulses of self-love, there- 
fore, do not constrain their observance of reason's dictate, 
to preserve a sound body as the vehicle and instrument 
of a sound mind. The force of religious sentiment, or of 
gratitude for kindnesses received, in supplying the want 
of these natural motives by spiritual incentives to work, 
is rare — by no means universal. Slavery stabs the vitals 
of humanity here. The slave, as such, is constantly prone 
to find excuses for not working — to go lazily to the field, 
and to run with alacrity from it for any sort of pleasurable 
relaxation. It is a singular fact, that slaves rarely go 



10 A DISCOURSE OX 

to their morning corn fields in entire singing groups. 
They more frequently straggle thither singly or in 
small and silent squads. It is only Avhen their day's 
work is done, and they are returning home in the set- 
ting sun's refracted yellow ray, or the bland and mel- 
low twilight of quiet eventide, that their harmonious 
refrain, or happy choral song, is heard ! It is only in 
corn-husking labor that frost gemmed and star bespan- 
gled nig-ht is far and wide made vocal with the fervid 
tones of joyous revelry! To such work as this — to work 
that involves his own pleasure— the slave does indeed 
hie with alacrity. But to work that involves only his 
master's interest, he too often directs nought but reluctant 
steps. And he often regards even sickness as relaxation 
from toil. Hence he some times feigns sickness, and 
rarely takes the remedies for those slight indispositions, 
which, if neglected in their early stages, frequently ter- 
minate in fatal maladies. Consequently, the master has 
to keep a constant and anxious watch over his slaves, to 
guard them from unnecessary exposures to sickness — to 
see that they take their medicines when they are sick — 
to assure both them and himself of the fact, which the 
slaves themselves are somehow very slow to perceive, 
that they are well enough to return to work — and to take 
much other solicitous care to secure himself from both 
the loss of their labor and the loss of their lives. A fact 
within our own knowledge strikingly illustrates this cir- 
cumstance of slavery. During our residence in Frank- 
fort, Kentucky, from 1810 to 1814, Dr. Rush's phleboto- 
mising theory was in vogue. Then the negroes were 
every now and then feigning sickness, getting bled, and 
having an arm in a sling, so as to gain exemption from 
work and enjoy a holiday. Among them was a fine mu- 
latto, of great value to his master on account of his skill 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 11 

as a carpenter. The doctors used then to bleed with the 
spring- lancet. The slave, for reasons best known to him- 
self as a carpenter, preferred being bled in the right arm. 
In one of the oft repeated venesections, an "unskilful prac- 
titioner struck a tendon of the arm instead of, or together 
with, an artery. Inflammation supervened. And the 
consequence was, a stiffening and contraction of the right 
arm. The master, finding his usefulness gone, subjected 
the slave to a surgical operation. The doctor's shop in 
which it was performed, was next door to the office in 
which we were employed. We witnessed the operation; 
and never shall we forget the poor mulatto's groans and 
exclamations of agony ! The physician — not a regular 
surgeon — failed to restore the arm. And the master, who 
would not have taken one thousand dollars for him pre- 
viously, sold his slave, for a comparatively trifling price, 
a cripple for life ! 

Yes, the master of the black slave has to physic him 
well in sickness, and also feed and clothe him well, and 
every way take care of him, in health. The master's 
interest lies in this. He is as much bound to take care of 
this species of his property as of any other. Nay, he 
owes to this species more care in proportion to its greater 
value. And if he takes care of his slave when he has 
become valueless, — as the king of Prussia did of his fa- 
vorite superannuated war horses, — or if he extends to his 
slaves, of all ages and at all times, the various kindnesses 
of a benevolent and beneficent masterdom, it is but an- 
other evidence that the Lord of Mercy has permitted even 
the evil of slavery to exist for the exercise and develop- 
ment of high virtues in the slaveholder. And this is pre- 
cisely our view of it. But it is still an evil. It is an evil 
civilly, politically, morally and spiritually considered. 
We admit it is not a physical evil in respect to african 



12 A DISCOURSE ON 

slavery in this countrj, considered relatively to the con- 
dition of the negroes in Africa before they were captured, 
sold and deported as slaves. For we know that canni- 
balism reigned in Africa then, and that the wretched 
victims of victorious war would have been butchered, 
roasted, and eaten by their savage captors, if Providence 
had not mercifully snatched them, as brands from the 
burning, and permitted the slave trade to waft them to a 
civilized clime. Undoubtedly, then, the negro's phy- 
sical condition is bettered here. And, as we shall show 
in this discourse, Africans were permitted, by the Divine 
Providence, to be brought hither as slaves for the purpose 
of bettering their moral and intellectual condition also. 
But this is the work of an overruling providence, which 
is "ever from" actual as well as " seeming evil still educ- 
ing good, in endless progression," and is not the effect of 
any inherent property or quality of slavery. 

In answer, then, to the argument above noticed, we 
say, slavery is not, in our view, so much objected to on 
account of its being a physical evil to the black man, as 
on account of its being a civil, political, moral and spirit- 
ual evil to the Avhite man.. We do indeed think that 
slavery, in its owm specific tendencies, is also a physical 
evil to the blacks, considered relatively to their possible 
elevation as a race. For we know that the affections of 
the soul impart their forms and qualities to the blood, the 
flesh, and even the bones of tiie body. Medical men well 
know the influence of moral causes in producing and 
curing disease. A fit of choler not unfrequently produces 
the jaundice. A mother, suckling her infant while her 
soul was upheaved from its deepest dregs by the tumul- 
tuous emotions of jealousy, has caused it to die in con- 
vulsions. The passion of her soul imparted its virulent 
qualities to her milJv and poisoned her offspring ! The 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 13 

affections of an animal, too, give their quality to its flesli. 
The major part of a small village has been sickened by 
eating the beef of a maddened and hamstrung ox, killed 
in a fever, and sent to the shambles surcharged with its 
poisonous effects. All know how much the flesh of wild 
animals differs from that of tame. How much the meat 
on the breast of a wild turkey differs from that of a tame 
turkey's breast! The venison of a deer raised in a park 
is almost mutton in comparison with the venison of a deer 
roaming and bounding free through the wild woods.* 
Who has not observed the superior quality of hams made 
from mast-fed hogs fattened at last on corn, in compari- 
son with those made from stye-raised hogs? And what 
produces the difference? Is it not, that the affection of 
the animal roaming free in the enjoyment of its delights 
gives better properties to its flesh than can be found in 
the lazy and grunting obesity of stye-raised meat? And 
shall not the whole soul of freedom give a peculiar pro- 
perty to the very flesh of a freeman, wdiile the stooped 
spirit of forced bondage imparts an equally marked 
though different characteristic quality to the very flesh 
of the slave ? So of the forms of the body, and the con- 
tour of the face. Freedom and slavery has each its pe- 
culiar type. And not more does the full blooded racer, 
in comparison with the mongrel dray horse, show the 
qaality of his free spirit in his form and action, than does 
freedom show itself in the forms and habitual actions of 
the white and red man, while slavery stamps its signet 
in the black wax, or carves its peculiar form in the ebony, 
of the bondaged and drudging African. Hence we verily 
believe that the little negro's propensity to eat dirt is both 
the effect and the evidence of slavery's being a physical 

* " The hind is an animal of the forest, loving liberty more than any other 
animal." (A. C. 6113.) 



14 A DISCO UIi«E ON 

evil. And how it is a moral evil, is shown by its dehu- 
manizing or unhumanizing effects on the little negro's 
mother. 

But that slavery is a civil and spiritual, as well as a 
physical and moral, evil to the black man, is manifest 
from some of its other peculiar and distinctive unhuman- 
izing effects. The most peculiar human principle — that 
which makes man most like God — is the faculty of pre- 
vidence and providence. By this, man looks ahead, and 
provides in the present for the wants, the comforts and 
the pleasures of the future. Now slavery puts the axe 
to this root of humanity, by making the slave improvi- 
dent. The necessities of his condition do not develope 
this faculty in him by exercise. His master foresees and 
provides for him. He thus learns to live from hand to 
mouth. And hence, although he multiplies his species 
more rapidly as a slave, and enjoys a superior elevation 
of character while under the magnetic sphere and pro- 
tecting aegis of his white owner, yet he becomes incapa- 
citated to bear the weightier responsibilities, and dis- 
charge the higher duties, that would devolve on him as 
himself a freeman. So that, when african slavery is 
precipitately abolished, without a proper qualification of 
the slave for freedom, in a previous and gradual deve- 
lopment of this truly human principle of previdence and 
providence, the blacks generally decrease in numbers, 
deteriorate in character, and become less felicitous in 
physical condition. Observation and experience in the 
northern states — especially in Pennsylvania — prove the 
truth of this remark. So that, while the African remains 
thus a slave, his condition is, undoubtedly, better as such 
than it would be if he were suddenly manumitted in this 
country. But, as far as humanity is concerned, this 
effect of slavery upon the African, proves it to be an evil. 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 15 

And that it is civilly and politically such, every rightly 
observant and acutely discerning man, who, in descend- 
ing the Ohio river, studies the different aspects of the 
state of Ohio on the one side, and of the states of Virgrinia 
and Kentucky on the other, must he satisfied. That it 
is an evil to the African permitted here for the ultimate 
greater good of his race elsewhere, we believe and admit. 
Still, it is an evil — a moral, civil and political evil — to him 
here. And that slavery, as it now actually exists in the 
South, is a spiritual evil to the black man, is sufficiently 
evident from the fact, that the preservation of the insti- 
tution there, compels his master to interdict to him that 
education, and that action in high functions, which are 
indispensable for the right development of his immortal 
powers. 

We argue, then, that slavery is a more especial evil 
to the whites. No nation or community of intelligent 
men can force or receive an inferior race of their fellow- 
men into servile bondage, without virtue going out of 
them. The superior race inevitably loses a portion of its 
spiritual caloric by the contact ! The very act of mak- 
ing a black man his slave, or imperiously holding him as 
such, is an evil to the white man, because it debases the 
principle of his action, and so lowers the standard of hu- 
manity in himself. 

Life in time is a probation for life in eternity. What- 
ever principles a man acts from in this mundane sphere 
determine his form and quality in that spritual and celes- 
tial empyrean which is his soul's proper home. Conse- 
quently, all true elevation or depression of human charac- 
ter must be measured on the scale that marks the inter- 
vals between the upper and nether extremes of man's 
spiritual and celestial or sensual and animal natures. 
And whatever develops and strengthens by exercise the 



16 A DISCOURSE OX 

ruling passions of the one, must be formatively and ac- 
tively evil; and whatever develops and strengthens by 
exercise the ruling affections of the other, must be for- 
matively and actively good. Now our argument is, that 
slavery in the South, so far as its own inherent tendencies 
are considered, is an evil, because it debases the charac- 
ter of the poor white man, and makes the white property- 
holder naturally proud instead of spiritually humble. It 
generates in the rich white man a haughty chivalry and 
a proud sense of belligerous honor, instead of a spirit of 
christian meekness, and that manly forbearance under 
injury, and persistence in doing good despite of wrong, 
which characterized that a,ll-perfect type of pure huma- 
nity the Divine Saviour of the World. 

By nature, man's grand master passion is the love 
of himself, which pdmarily manifests itself in the delight 
of exercising dominion over other persons, and second- 
arily in the delight of possessing all valuable things. 
For in the possession of these, self expects to secure that 
respect, deference and service from others, which it loves. 
To the activity of this master passion, in its two chief 
forms of love of power and love of wealth, must be as- 
cribed those false notions of honor, of glory, of fame, ,of 
adulation, and of respectability in the abject dependence 
and service of others, which prompt nations to war and 
conquest, and individuals to overreaching, fraud and 
oppression. And in the train of these follow all mortal 
pains and miseries. In short, however men may gild 
or polish them liy outside and factitious amenities, the 
love of money is the root, and the love of rule is the sap, 
of all evil. These passions, then, indigenous to all men in 
their state by nature, are both essentially and formally 
evil, whenever they become principles of the mind. A 
principle of the mind is whatever a man proposes to him- 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERV. 17 

self as the final end of his action. Hence, when a man 
proposes to himself power and wealth as ends, he acts 
from evil principles — which are the opposites and anta- 
gonists of love to God and charity to the neighbor.* But 
when those principles are, by reformation and regenera- 
tion, subordinated to these, they become relatively good. 
In other words, when the love of power and the love of 
wealth react ordinately on the love of God and the love 
of the neighbor, so as to serve as means for the attainment 
of their ends, they partake of the quality of the ends to 
which they are subservient, and are good and not evil. 
These natural loves, when separated from those spiritual 
loves, are like the rod of Aaron when cast from him upon 
the earth — a crawling venomous serpent : but when sub- 
ordinate and subservient to them, they are like that ser- 
pent taken up by Moses — a staff, support or power in the 
hand of the spiritual man.f 

* " If a man regards self and the world as ends, let him know that he is infer- 
nal ; but if he regards the good of his neighbor, the general good, the Lord's 
kingdom, and especially the Lord himself, let him know that he is celestial." 
(A. C. 1909.) 

" All evils and falsities come from worldly, terrestrial and corporeal loves, 
when they prevail." (A. C. 10.492.) 

f " Corporeal and sensual things are in themselves merely material, inanimate 
and dead ; but they are made alive by the delights which come from the interiors 
in their orderly arrangements. Hence it appears that, according to the quality 
of the life of the interiors, such is the delightsomeness of pleasures, inasmuch as 
in delight there is life. The delight wherein there is good from the Lord, is 
alone a living delight ; for, in such case, it has life from the essential life of good. 
* * * Some suppose that whosoever wishes to be happy in the other life, 
ought by no means to live in the pleasures of the body and of sensual things, but 
to refuse all such enjoyments ; and they urge in favor of this notion, that corporeal 
and worldly things draw off and detain the mind from spiritual and celestial life. 
But they who suppose so, and, in consequence thereof, resign themselves up 
voluntarily to miseries whilst they live in the world, are ignorant of the real truth 
in the case. It is by no means forbidden any one to enjoy the pleasures of the 
body and of sensual things, that is to say, the pleasures arising from the posses- 
sion of lands and money; the pleasures arising from honors and offices in the 

3 



18 A DISCOURSE ON 

By that reformation and regeneration in which man is 
gifted with a new nature from the Lord, man's sublime 
master passion is the supreme love of God, which gene- 
rates disinterested love to mankind. Love to God is the 
great right side, and love to mankind is the great left side, 
which, uniting in the median line of universal usefulness, 
form the perfect symmetry of divine humanity. These 
are spiritual, celestial and divine loves, which actuated 
man in his pristine state or golden age of purity and bliss. 
And as his fall consisted in his gradually ceasing to act 
from these, and, in long process of time, coming to act 
wholly from those natural, sensual and corporeal loves, 

state; the pleasures of eonjugial love, and love towards infants and children; 
the pleasures of friendship and of social intercourse; the pleasures of hearing, or 
of the sweetnesses of singing and music ; the pleasures of sight, or of beauties, 
which are manifold — as handsome raiment, well-furnished houses, beautiful gar- 
dens, and the like — which things are delightful by reason of the harmony con- 
tained in them ; the pleasures of smelling, or of the sweetness of odors; the 
pleasures of taste, or of the agreeableness and usefulness of meats and drinks ; 
and the pleasures of touch : for these are the extreme or corporeal affections, 
which have their origin, as Avas said, from the interior affections. The interior 
affections which are alive, all derive their delight from goodness and truth ; and 
goodness and truth derive their delight from charity and faith ; and, in this case, 
from the Lord ; consequently, from the very essential life. Wherefore, the 
affections and pleasures which have this origin, are alive. And whereas genuine 
pleasures are from such source, they are never denied to any one : yea, when they 
are derived from that source, then their delight indefinitely exceeds the delight 
which is from any other source, and which is respectively filthy and defiled. 
* * * That the pleasures above mentioned are by no means denied to man, — 
yea, so far from being denied, that they then first become pleasures when they are 
derived from their true origin, — may further appear from this consideration, that 
very many who have lived in the world in power, dignity and opulence, and who 
enjoyed abundantly all pleasures, both of the body and of the things of sense, are 
among the blessed and happy in heaven ; and with them the interior delights and 
happiness are now alive ; because such delights and happiness had their source 
in the good things of charity and the truths of faith towards the Lord : and, de- 
riving pleasure from charity and faith towards the Lord, they regard them all 
with a view to use, which was their end in the enjoyment of them; for it was 
use itself which was to them most delightful ; and hence came the delight of 
their pleasures,'' (A. C 995) 



FREETJOM AND SLAVERV. 1 <J 

as principles, so his restoration must consist in a free and 
rational reinversion of his state. In this reinversion, the 
natural loves of power and wealth are not to be destroyed 
as absolutely evil, according to the Enthusiasts and Per- 
fectionists of the Fenelon or Madame Guion school, but 
are to be put from the centre off to the circumference as 
evil relatively. While they ordinately react in the cir- 
cumference on love to God and love to mankind in the 
centre, they are in order. And it is only when they rush 
to the centre, so as to shove those heavenly loves to the 
circumference, that they are in disorder, and thus evil. 
As, then, these natural loves are good when in order, and 
only become evil when in disorder, we are enabled to dis- 
cern the great truth, that all evil is perverted good. 

Discerning thus the nature of a principle and the na- 
ture of evil, we are brought clearly to see w^hat good is, 
and what is the principle of good. And as true humanity 
is good in form and activity, we can also see, most clearly, 
what elevates, and what depresses, humanity in mankind. 
By the law of opposites, love to God and charity to the 
neighbor are good. And the principle of good is man's 
acting with a final end to good; that is, his doing good 
for oroodness' sake. " God is love," and " God is liofht." 
God is goodness itself, and God is truth itself. Hence, 
to do what is good and true for the sake of goodness and 
truth, is to love God. ^' Charity is an affection of being 
serviceable to others, without having respect to any re- 
compence " — thus is diametrically opposed to selfishness 
and its domineering and possessing propensities. " The 
neighbor, towards whom charity is to be exercised, is all 
in the universe, but still each with discrimination " as to 
the good that is in him. Thus '• to love the Lord and the 
neighbor is, in general, to perform uses." And hence the 
divine lav/, that he is the greatest of all who is the servant 



'20 A DISCOURSE ON 

of all. The Lord himself came not to be ministered unto, 
but to minister. Consequently, the true dignity of hu- 
manity is to serve ; and the post of true honor is the ren- 
dering useful services to others. Hence, humanity is 
elevated by useful service, and depressed by imperious 
sway. And as the essence of true humanity is the acting 
'' in freedom according to reason," therefore the most 
perfect man is he who has the highest intelligence guid- 
ing the most virtuous will in the most widely extended 
usefulness to all other men: while the most imperfect 
man is he who has the lowest intelligence, without any 
rational will of his own, but is forced to obey the man- 
dates and subserve the will of some other one man in 
promoting his interests, just as the mere animal does. 
Consequently, as that is an evil which depresses huma- 
nity, african slavery in this country is an evil, because it 
is the forced or involuntary service of one or a few, rather 
than the free or voluntary service of all or many. In 
short, african slavery in this country is an evil, because 
it tends to make the master more a natural man, and the 
slave more an animal. 

But we can better state the case thus. Slavery is an 
evil, because it outrages or mars true humanity in two 
chief respects. First, it develops and strengthens by 
exercise the love of dominion from the love of self. Any 
person who has lived in a slave state, knows this by having 
observed its effect on the masters' offspring. The little 
white learns to domineer over the little black, in ordering 
him about, buffeting him, and making him bend wholly 
to his will and pleasure as his prospective property. It 
is seen in the tones of voice, and in every gesture and 
motion of the body, with which he speaks and acts to the 
little slave. Hence, as we have before said, comes pride, 
— which is contempt of others in comparison with self, — 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 21 

a false sense of honor, a most quick proclivity to resent 
injuries, and a supercilious and anti-christian hantiness 
to inferiors, which never can be compensated by that ease 
of manners, and polish of intellectual refinement, in in- 
tercourse with equals, which exemption from low labor 
and the appliances of leisure and learning impart to the 
wealthy slaveholder. We grant that this principle does 
elaborate from human nature, as now constituted, the 
higher order of minds in the military and naval profes- 
sions, or in the executive departments of government. 
But this is because mankind are now almost wholly na- 
tural, and require the government of natural passions 
individually and of natural men collectively. And it is, 
as we think, the chief evil characteristic of human slavery, 
that it develops in the masters the natural, in antagonism 
to the spiritual^ love of rule — which natural love, when 
not subordinated, is, as we have shown, selfish and worldly, 
and therefore evil. For " the desire to bear rule is some- 
what of human proprium different from what is received 
of the Lord : nevertheless, all [spiritual] rule [such as 
that of the angels] is of love and mercy witliout a desire 
to bear rule." (A. C. 1755.) 

Secondly, slavery is an evil, because it makes labor 
disgraceful. In this respect, it is more especially a civil 
and political evil. In this respect, it is essentially aris- 
tocratic and anti-republican. And we will add, it is, in 
this respect, essentially anti-christian. For, as we have 
shown, it is the spirit of Christianity to make useful ser- 
vice honorable, and thus to elevate in the scale of respec- 
tability the agricultural, commercial and mechanic arts. 
But it is the direct tendency of slavery to make those 
professions wdiich enjoy exemption from physical labor 
the most respectable. The possessor and enjoyer of wealth 
is always more honorable in slave countries than the 



'^'i A DLSCOTIRSE ON 

maker and profitable user of wealth. Now that this is a 
spiritual evil, in its influences on the church, may he 
known from the simple fact, that it induced the Jews, in 
the time of our Lord's first advent, to disparage, if not to 
reject, him, because he was a carpenter'' s son. And how 
this disparagement of a man because he pursues a me- 
chanical calling, or this making labor disgraceful, is a 
civil and political evil, in its influences on the common- 
wealth, any discerning man can see at a glance. For 
instance, in case of the sons of the wealthy, who are not 
stimulated by ambition to shine in the spheres of literary, 
professional or political preeminence, and are unfortu- 
nately more impelled by the natural love of pleasure than 
by the spiritual love of use, this degradation of labor 
throws them into the spheres of gambling and dissipation. 
All heaven is a continent of uses. And so far as men on 
earth are engaged in doing uses from heavenly ends, they 
breathe and pulsate with heaven, and have the sphere of 
heaven around them for their protection from the assaults 
of vagrant and libidinous spirits. Hence one of the chief 
safeguards of young men from vice is useful employment. 
But where useful labor is disreputable, genteel young 
men are ashamed to engage in it, because they lose caste 
in such occupation. And the energies of their minds, 
needing excitement for their pleasurable development, 
draw them to the race course, the billiard table, the cock 
pit, the gambling club room, the carousal, or other name- 
less places of resort, for the killing of time which hangs 
so heavy on the man who finds life only in the vortices 
of pleasure or the rounds of fashionable society. As we 
have seen, when the sensuous things of pleasure, together 
with games of chance and athletic sports, are occasionally 
enjoyed as relaxations from useful labor, or unbending 
recreations of the mind, which enable it to return to its 



FKEEUUM AND SLAVERV. 23 

mental avocations with renewed ^igor, they are subser- 
vient to use, and so useful and proper themselves. But 
when they are made the sole objects of life, they dissipate 
all of man's truly virile powers, and destroy or enervate 
his soul. At least, the exclusive pursuit of them unfits 
young men for any high service of the commonwealth. 
And, in this case, the community is injured by the loss 
of the valuable executive services, of some of her best 
sons, in stations of high trust and responsible function. 
So, too, in the case of poor white men and their offspring, 
the community loses a great fountain of her wealth and 
prosperity in the absence of that superior quality and 
richer quantity of productive services, which results from 
the want of the stimulus of an lionorable calling acting as 
a premium in drawing out the higher order of agricultural, 
mechanical, or commercial abilities. As man always 
stamps the form of his own quality upon his work, be it 
what it may, how is it possible that the community can 
be so much enriched or benefited by the productions of de- 
graded slave labor in agriculture, for example, as by the 
productions of the dignified labor of men of the higher 
order of intellectual power and moral worth! 

In view of this, no one need hesitate for a moment in 
accounting for the fact that capital and population, with 
their political influence, have increased in a vastly greater 
ratio in our northern than in our southern states. And 
most vain is the hypothesis, that, if southern capital had 
been kept in the South, and not drained from it by tarif 
restrictions, european imigration would have prevailed 
more at the South, instead of occurring wholly at the 
North, so as to have preserved there an equilibrium of 
political power. For never will free white men, however 
unpropitious their physical or political condition, migrate 
to a country where slavery has made their labor disgrace- 



24 A DISCOURSE ON 

ful and their arts or handicrafts disreputable. White 
men will indeed go to slave states, and labor in commer- 
cial or mechanical callings, with a view of getting rich 
and enjoying their wealth elsewhere, or with a view to 
become themselves slaveholders, and to acquire the re- 
spectability which wealth gives, in the South : but this 
is an exception to the general rule, which only confirms 
it; for it proves that those callings are disreputable in 
comparison with slaveholding wealth and otium cum dig- 
nitate* They never w^ould go thither to pursue those 
callings with a sole view to the use of them, and to the 
community's good in their faithful and efficient continued 
pursuit of them. They never would go thither, if they 
were sure that they should always remain in those call- 
ings where their wives and daughters would not be visited 
by respectable people because their husbands and bro- 
thers were mechanics. Or the number of such persons 
migrating to slave states would be very small in compa- 
rison with the number of them coming to free states. 
They seldom think of migrating to states where the own- 
ers of kind stand at the top of the social ladder, and the 
workers of land are drudging slaves at the bottom; and 
all rounds for respectahle middle classes are excluded, or 

* It is conceded, that the principles of self-love and love of the world have 
this same aristocratic tendency every where. Hence, in the free states, they ge- 
nerate invidious distinctions in society, hy which the members of the common 
body are arrayed against one another in the most unhappy and some times the most 
fatal antagonism. They generate an aristocracy of wealth there too ; and also a 
disparaging estimate of the mechanical callings. But they do not do it there in 
so great a degree as in slave states ; and we argue that the institution of human 
slavery, as an exciting or determining cause, has more directly and inevitably this 
tendency. Whereas Christianity, regarding all professions and callings as uses 
of one common body which " is not one member, but many," that tend, by their 
mutual relations and their various adaptations to the common good, to the perfec- 
tion of the whole, esteems "much more those members of the body, which seem 
to be more feeble, as necessary : and upon those members of the body, which ice 
think to be less honorable, she bestows more abundant honor." (I Cor. xii. 12-27. 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 25 

confined to cities and large towns, by this worse than 
feudalism; and thus where slavery not only disparages 
mechanical pursuits, but also excludes, in general, from 
the community, the small landholder, who tills with his 
oivn hands the soil he owns, and therefore has a more sti- 
mulating interest in developing the utmost productive 
powers of the whole land for the greater wealth and pros- 
perity of the whole body politic. 

The inherent and legitimate effect of slavery is, then, 
we repeat, to degrade labor in general. Look at its effect 
on the poor wdiite agriculturalists, who roam through the 
pine lands that intervallate the sea coast and the moun- 
tain regions of the Carolinas, and spend more than half 
their time in fishing or hunting, rather than be yoke-fel- 
lows with negroes in tilling the soil. Witness the con- 
tempt which the Bedouin Arab feels for the cultivator of 
the earth. He only regards him as the eagle does the 
fish hawdf. The poorest specimens of white humanity 
that we ever laid our eyes on, were the country people 
wdio came in with their produce to the Charleston 
market ! 

But the effect of slavery, in making useful labor disre- 
putable, is best seen in the slaves' own estimation of those 
who are obliged to pursue it for a livelihood. It is w^ell 
known that the slaves look upon the poor v/hites as be- 
neath them. Even in Maryland, we know how difficult 
it is for poor whites to get black servants, that are worth 
having, to work for them. The genteel negroes have an 
utter contempt for what they call " the poor white trasW ! 
They would rather starve, and work their fingers to the 
quick, in the service of white gentility, than live on the 
fat of the land in the families of those wdiom they esteem 
disreputable mechanics. This is the fact in general : and 
it renders more intensive the evidence that slavery makes 
4 



2G A DISCOURSE ON 

labor disgraceful; and therefore is a civil and political 
evil. Unquestionably, Washington, — whose memory we 
now essay to honor, — Washington, that bright particular 
star in the great galaxy of american worthies, and all the 
greater lights that sparkled in the glorious firmament of 
our american revolution, thus regarded slavery. Surely, 
then, we may conclude that slavery is an evil. 

But whether slavery is a 5m, is quite another question. 
Not a little confusion of ideas seems to prevail in some 
minds on this subject. Perhaps those who think slavery 
a sin, mean no more than that it is an evil. There is, 
however, a material distinction, which is to be observed 
between these two terms. There is the same distinction 
between evil and sin that there is between an inclination 
to do what is wrong and the actual doing it. The chaste 
and pious Joseph said, on a memorable occasion, " How 
shall I DO this great evil, and sin against God." This 
shows that sin is the doing of evil. Evil is that which 
tempts man. For " every man is tempted when he is 
drawn of his own lust, and enticed." (James, i. 4.) No 
man can be enticed by any thing but that which lie loves : 
for to this the love, which is his veriest life, always in- 
clines him. And the love of self, which inclines one con- 
stantly to seek and act for its own interest and gratifica- 
tion at the expense of every common good, is, as we have 
shown, essentially evil. This love is the fountain-head 
of every inordinate natural passion, which the apostle 
calls lust. Hence, the inclination of lust, which draws 
away and entices, is evil; and to give way to the inclina- 
tion — to yield to the enticement, and so to do the evil, is 
sin. For, as the apostle, John, declares, "sin is the trans- 
gression of the law." In other words, evil is sin in inti- 
mate conception, and sin is evil brought forth into life. 

Now, with this discrimination in our eye, we may see 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. -27 

that slavery, though undoubtedly an evil, may not, in all 
cases, be a sin. Or, if a sin, may be one which the apostle 
deems "not unto death;" but which may be "prayed 
for." The apostle declares, " all unrighteousness is sin : " 
that is, sin consists in all transgression of the divine 
laws. But, says he, " there is a sin not unto death." 
Doubtless, the sin which is unto death is voluntary sin ; 
and that which is not unto death is involuntary. The 
sin of ignorance is involuntary sin. So is the sin of he- 
reditary transmission ; so far as it does not become actual 
evil by one's own irrational volition. Still, both these 
kinds of involuntary sin, although not unto death, mast 
occasion to the committer of them some degree of penalty. 
"The Lord," says the doctrine of our church, "requires 
no more of a man than that he should do according to 
w^hat he knows to be true."* Hence the condemnation 
and fatality of all sin lie in a man's knowing vv^hat is true, 
and yet willing and acting contrary to it — in "loving 
darkness rather than light, because his deeds are evil." 
So that, if a man " knows his Lord's will, and does things 
w^orthy of stripes, he shall be beaten with many stripes." 
But " if he knows not his Lord's will, and yet does things 
worthy of stripes, he shall be beaten \Ai\\fe7v stripes." 
Li both cases, a penalty is inflicted ; but in the former a 
heavy, and in the latter a light one. Hence, if slavery 
be an evil, all wdio are implicated in it — even those who 
are innocently implicated — must suffer in some degree 
from it.f But those who do not ](now, or believe, it to be 

* The same doctrine is taught by our church in this form: "Those who 
know their duty, and not those who are ignorant of it, are the objects of imputa- 
tion, whether it be of righteousness or of guilt; just as blind men, when they 
stumble, are no objects of blame ; for the Lord says, ' If ye were blind, ye would 
have no sin; but now you say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth.' John, ix. 
41." (U. T. 127.) 

f Evil is its own punishment. In the divine economy, the effects of evil are 



2S A DISCOURSE ON 

wrong, are not condernnable on account of it as sin. 
Neither are those guilty sinners, who have had slavery 
entailed on them by hereditary transmission. But to 
those who do know, or believe, it to be sinful, the impli- 
cation of it is indeed a heinous offence both against God 
and man. For surely no one can doubt, that, while 
voluntary service, or the service of love and therefore of 
freedom, is supernal, forced service, or that service which 
fear renders to imperious masterdom, is infernal. 

Now we cannot believe that slavery in our southern 
states is heinously sinful. We do indeed believe it is an 

made to react upon it for its own correction. If, therefore, slavery be an evil, as 
we suppose it is, there must be some evil effects of it, which must, by their 
reactions, ultimately remove it from the slave states. Pharaoh, whether he be 
the love of power or the love of wealth, will he plagued until he lets the Children 
of Africa go! This is not the place to name or describe the plagues by which 
the divine will in the exodus of the Africans is to be brought about. It is enough 
to know the counsel of the Almighty, and to yield willing, rational and co-opera- 
tive acquiescence in his august behest. Perhaps the manifest lagging of the 
slave states behind the free ones of their political sisterhood in all the race of 
natural wealth and civil power, will convince them that it is their interest to sub- 
stitute voluntary for forced labor in developing the resources of their country. 
Perhaps, in view of the moral workings of their system, and of the political 
axiom, that the price of our liberties is eternal vigilance, they may feel impelled, 
by the most powerful of all incentives, to do their own working, as well as their 
own voting and fighting! But there is one evil effect of slavery in this country, 
which we ought not to pass unnoticed. It is the civil leprosy — the plague spot 
on the fair face of our social polity — of a degraded and hybrid race, in a state of 
quasi freedom, without the power of amalgamation or healthy assimilation in our 
body politic, but deforming and sickening it by parasitic attachment and nou- 
rishment. Surely we need not state how this is an ultimate evil. The mere 
fact of the solicitous efforts of the slave states themselves to get rid of this portion 
of their population, proves it. And any who have lived in contact with the 
unchristianized and naturally worst sort of this race in the free states, need not be 
told of their being a thieving and predatory nuisance to the whites. Nor need they 
be reminded that the confessions of the more malignant have shown us, that the blacks 
feel themselves justified in thus furtively preying upon the whites, by revenge for the 
wrong they have done them in making them slaves! Is not this, then, a reaction of 
the evil of slavery? Is it not a righteous retribution? Is it not a plague to 
compel Pharaoh in us to let the Africans go? 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 29 

evil: but we hold it to be an evil mercifully permitted, 
in the divine restorative economy, for an ultimate or final 
good. What that is, we shall see as v^^e proceed. Or if 
southern slavery be a sin, we are sure it is not one that is 
unto death. It is a venial transmitted sin. The insti- 
tution of slavery was entailed upon the southern states by 
the mother country's cupidity. Hence we regard it there 
in the light of an hereditary evil, which requires much 
love and wisdom — great prudence, care, patience and 
tender solicitude — in its eradication. It must be reofarded 
as a politically constitutional disease, which can be cured 
only by time, wise political dietetics, and intelligent skill 
exciting the body politic' s recuperatii^e energies. All 
nature is as abhorrent to sudden change as to a vacuum. 
And the sin of slavery sinks into absolute insignificance 
in comparison with the egregious sin of those political 
or morbidly philanthropic quacks, who, by their heroic 
treatment of this disease — by their sudden alteratives, 
their decided blood-lettings, their drastic purges, their 
violent counter-irritants, and their other strong remedies 
— would either kill the patient, or inflict upon his shat- 
tered constitution vastly greater and more incurable fac- 
titious diseases, if, by some mercifully providential for- 
tuity, he should happen to get well in spite of their phy- 
sic ! No true man will he forced to do even what is right. 
And the very worst effect of all objurgatory and even 
seeming compulsory efforts to destroy the evil of slavery 
in the South as damning sin, has been the driving of our 
southern brethren into the justification of it as a divine 
institution and a positive good. Thus do extremes beget 
extremes. The truly wise and proper course is to reason 
w^ith our brethren in true political love — to show them, 
if we can, their error in kindness ; and by convincing 
their reason, so act upon their own wills as to get them 



30 A DISCOURSE ON 

to work themselves in freely and rationally putting off an 
acknowledged evil. It is moreover our duty to help bear 
their political burden; and, in this, to share the self- 
sacrifice and the pecuniary or other loss of their evil's 
eradication. Nay, it is our privilege to be participants 
with them in that high national virtue which we verily 
believe is to be gained by this country in doing magna- 
nimous justice to Africa. For we are sure that the evil 
of african slavery has been permitted, by Divine Provi- 
dence, to exist in this country for that end, as we hope to 
show in the sequel of this discourse. And it is our duty, 
not only to help oar southern brethren to see this, if we 
can, but also to be co-operators with them in their noble 
work. 

We are aware that our assertions are to some startling. 
Many think the permission of human slavery by a mer- 
ciful divine providence is an inscrutable or inexplicable 
mystery. To some minds, indeed, it borders on blas- 
phemy to say, that God could have connived at, by per- 
mitting, an evil so great, or a sin so heinous. But it is 
well to remember, that " God's ways are not as man's 
w^ays," and are always "equal" — however otherwise they 
may seem to short-sighted mortals. Not only is the Lord 
ever "from seeming evil still educing good;" but all real 
evil is permitted by him for no other purpose.* There- 

* The Lord's government of the universe is called providence. Or, providence 
is " arrangement into good." (A. C. 10.452.) " Evils, however, are not provided, 
but previded, that is, foreseen, and in like manner permissions. But — that it 
may be known how the case is — previdence relates to evils; but providence is 
the arrangement of them to good ends. There is, however, no chance ; that is, 
no evil can happen by chance. But all evils are so governed, that no evil what- 
ever but what conduces to good is permitted to befal either man or [departed] 
soul : consequently, nothing is permitted but what must have been foreseen in 
the way of the discernment of an inevitable event. Therefore it follows, that 
various evils are so turned as to have such a form [as conduces to good,] and no 
other; and it cannot but be [that evils occur] in a state so perverse [as that of 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERV. 31 

fore, we are bound to believe, that african slavery in this 
country has been permitted, in the Lord's wise and mer- 
ciful providence, for some ultimate good. 

Certainly members of the New Jerusalem should not 
entertain any doubt on this subject. They know that the 
Africans are of a celestial genius.- Even now, in the 



mankind, in the abuse of tlieir rational and voluntary faculties, has become.] 
Thus it is providence alone which governs ; for previdence, or foresight, is thus 
changed into providence, and thus evils are so previded as to be changed into 
good : since, if the foreseen [designs] of evil spirits were permitted, they would 
tend to the destruction of both men and souls. Wherefore the evils intended by 
evil spirits are turned into such things as are permissible." (Diary, I., p. 334, 
n. 1088.) 

" The Lord foresees and beholds all and singular things ; and provides for and 
disposes of all and singular thills : yet in some cases by permission, in some by 
admission, in some by leave, in some by good pleasure, in some by will." (A. 
C. 1755.) 

* This, doubtless, will be to many the most startling of our assertions. And 
certainly, to all appearance, the assertion is most untrue. Africans, as we see 
them in this country, are a degraded race. The bondage in which they are, is a 
correspondent of their mental and moral degradation. Their enslaved condition is 
an outbirth of their interior evils, and, as a reaction on them for their correction or 
restraint, is a sort of penitentiary ])unishment of their defects of character. The 
mere fact of their being slaves, also, produces a prejudice against them; and, by 
the association of ideas, their color, their woolly heads, and their every peculiar 
and distinctive feature, are connected with all that is low and debased in humanity. 
Hence to say they are of a celestial genius, shocks the common sense of men 
around us. But in rightly estimating any form of our common humanity, we 
must look with philosophic eyes, and "judge righteous judgment." And thus, 
in estimating the peculiar genius of the african race, we must send our intellectual 
vision through outside, deceptions appearances, to their interior qualities; or we 
must apprehend the exterior forms or types of those qualities by that revived 
science of correspondences which makes effects exponents of their causes. But 
let us first learn what is meant by celestial, and what is the distinguishing charac- 
teristic of the celestial man. 

"To know what is true by virtue of what is good, is celestial." " Man is i 
called celestial, if the Lord's divine good is received in the will part — spiritual, 
if in the intellectual part." (A. C. 5150.) "The celestial man is one who, from 
the will principle, is in good, and thence in truth ; and he is distinguished from 
the spiritual man in this, that the latter, from the intellectual principle, is in truth, 
and thence in good." (A. C. G295.) "They who are in the Lord's spiritual 



32 A DISCOURSE ON 

central regions of Africa, — as yet unexplored by Euro- 
peans, — there is a celestial church, which has the imme- 

kingdom worship him from faith ; hut they who are in his celestial kingdom 
worship him from love." (A. C. 10.645.) 

From this it appears, that the celestial principle of humanity, is love, will or 
affection ; and that a man of celestial genius is one whose distinguishing charac- 
teristic is action from this principle. Now every external of the African is a 
celestial correspondent. His having wool instead of hair, with his strong pro- 
pensities for laughing, singing and dancing, are all such. His color seems to be 
against this hypothesis. But, besides that we have the best reason for knowing 
that the soul or spirit of the good and wise African is white, and have some reason 
for believing that the bodies of the higher tribes in the centre of Africa are white 
also, we iTiust remember that the correspondence of the spiritual things of the soul 
is with the uses of the natural things of the body, and not with the substance, form 
or modification of its organs. Thus the correspondence of the understanding is 
with the sight of the eye, and not with the eye i||elf ; the correspondence of the 
perception of the mind is with the smell, and not with the nose; the correspond- 
ence of the obedience of the will is with the hearing, and not with the ear; and 
so forth. Hence the correspondence of the distinctive genius of the African is 
with the itse of the color of his skin, and not with the color itself. What, then, 
is the use of a black skin in the african race? and is this use a spiritual or a 
celestial correspondent 1 

We know that black does not reflect either light or heat, but absorbs both ; and, 
in absorbing heat from one side, transmits it to the other. Hence the water in a 
copper tea-kettle, the bottom of which is scoured bright, will not boil near so soon 
as when the bottom is blackened with smoke or soot. So heated water in a 
silver tea-pot will not part with its caloric near so fast, when the surface of 
the pot is thoroughly cleaned by polishing, as when it is soiled or discolored 
by being tarnished and uncleaned ; and, as the virtue of the tea is more 
thoroughly extracted by drawing, the hotter the water is, therefore white 
china and polished metallic tea-pots are much better for drawing tea than 
any of the colored sorts. The use of a black skin in the negro is, then, the 
ready absorption and radiation of heat. Heat in the natural world corresponds to 
love in the spiritual world. This is the reason that a man becomes warm from 
passion, and that the natives of hot climates are apt to be choleric and jealous. 
Hence the countries of the torrid zone, which lie constantly under the sun's ver- 
tical rays, have a celestial correspondence in the material cosmos, and the men of 
those countries are relatively of a celestial genius. Nothing can be clearer than 
that the negro is as much formed by the whole constitution of his body, as well 
as by the color of his skin, for living, and enjoying life, in the intense intertropical 
heat of Africa, as the camel is formed for travelling in african deserts. In fact, 
he is a sort of human salamander. And it is because the negro can endure a 
degree of heat which kills the white man, that the blacks are better fitted to cnl- 



FREEDOM AND SLAVER V. 3*3 

diate revelation of truth by angelic spirits.^ Hence Africa 
in its confines, or in its circumferential regions, must be 

tivate the rice, cotton and sugar plantations of the South, and of the West Indies, 
than the whites ; and why black can never compete with white labor in moun- 
tainous and frosty regions. The negro has this power in the peculiar organization 
of his skin, which not only has an additional layer that secretes a black pigment, 
but also a more copiously and rapidly perspirable structure. By the blackness 
and the greater perspirable property of his skin, he radiates heat and evacuates 
humors more readily and rapidly than the white man. Hence the animal heat 
and morbid humors which, pent up by his white skin, kill the Caucasian in 
Africa with fevers, are no impediment to the negro's free and full enjoyment of 
life there. This is one reason why the whites have never yet been able fully to 
explore the centre of Africa. The Mighty Lord has encircled that centre with a 
wall of fire, which is a far more effectual barrier against the inroads of the Euro- 
peans, than the wall of China ever was against those of the Tartars. And as 
this is a clear indication of the divine will that Africa should be inhabited, im- 
proved, reformed, regenerated, governed and elevated solely or mainly by Africans, 
therefore justice to Africa demands that Europeans, and their descendants in 
America, who hold her sons in servile bondage or slavish apprenticeship, should 
send them back to her, having previously fitted them for a happy repose on her 
bosom ! 

We conclude, that, as the african race, color and all, are correspondents of heat 
in the torrid zone; and as heat there is a correspondent of love in the celestial 
kingdom of the spiritual world ; therefore Africans are of a celestial genius. 
Their degraded forms and characters here, and their hideous forms and horrid 
barbarities in the circumferential parts of their own country, are the results of the 
utter perversion of their more noble nature. For, as all evil Ls but perverted 
good, the more exalted and more perfect the good, the more debased and more 
deformed must be the evil which results from its perversion. 

When we know that the quarters of the compass in this world signify the four 
cardinal states of the soul in the other world; and that the east in the spiritual 
world is where the Lord is in love to him and from him; we may see what is the 
spiritual position of Africa, relatively to Asia and Europe, from the following 
revelation : " The angels, when Asia is named, perceive the south ,• when Europe 
is named, they perceive the north ,• and when Africa is named, they perceive the 
east.'''' (Ap. Ex. 21.) This shows that, in the perception of the angels, Africans 
are of the celestial genius. 

* The distinguishing truths of Christianity are " comprehended and received by 
the Africans" in the other world, "inasmuch as they think more interiorly and 
spiritually than others. Such being the character of the Africans even in this 
world, there is therefore at this day a revelation begun among them, which is 
communicated from the centre round about, but does not extend to the sea coasts. 
They acknowledge our Lord as the Lord of heaven and earth, and laugh at the 

5 



^34 A DISCOURSE OX 

the celestial man in a degenerate state.* This man, in a 
good degenerate type, must be a willing obedience to 
some master;! and, in a bad degenerate type, must be the 
most revolting combatant for dominion over his fellows — 

Monks who visit them, and at Christians who talk of a threefold divinity, and of 
salvation by mere thought — asserting- that there is no man, who worships at all, 
that does not live according to his religion; and that, unless a man so lives, he 
must needs become stupid and wicked, because, in such case, he receives nothing 
from heaven. They likewise give the name of stupidity to ingenious wickedness, 
because there is not life but death in it." All " the things contained in the doc- 
trine of the New Jerusalem," which are now revealed from heaven, for the use of 
a new and true christian church in christian countries, by writing and the press, 
"are now revealed, by word of mouth, through angelic spirits, to the inhabitants 
of that country." (Con. L. J. 75, 7G.) 

" The new church is planted in the centre of Africa amongst those who live a 
good life, according to the best of their knowledge, and worship one God under 
a human form." (C. L. 114.) 

* To show tliat, among all heathen nations, the Africans stand preeminent as 
men of an interior and celestial order, we quote the following authorities: 

In revealing the third state of men after death, " which is the state of instruc- 
tion of those who come into heaven," our church thus describes the character 
and genius of the heathen nations: they "who, in the world, have led a good 
life in conformity with their religion, and have thence derived a species of con- 
science, and have done what is just and right, not so much on account of the laws 
of their government, but on account of the laws of religion, which they believed 
ought to be kept holy, and in no respect to be violated by overt acts — all these, 
when they are instructed, are easily led to acknowledge the Lord ; because it is 
impressed on their hearts that God is not an invisible being, but a being visible 
under a human form. These, in number, exceed all the rest. The hesf of them 
are from Jifrica'' (H. & H. 511.) 

"Such among the Gentiles as, in the world, have worshiped God under a 
human form, and have lived a life of charity according to their religion, are con- 
joined to Christians in heaven ; for they acknowledge and worship the Lord more 
than the rest. The most intelligent of them are from Jfrica.'" (L. J. 51.) 

"The Gentiles are also distinguished according to their genius, and their dif- 
ferent capacities of receiving light through the heavens from the Lord ; for there 
are among them both interior and exterior men, which arises partly from climate, 
partly from parentage, partly from education, and partly from religion. The 
Africans are a more interior people than any other of the Gentiles.'''' (U.T. 8.35.) 

f "Among all the nations in heaven, the Africans are most beloved, for they 
receive the goods and truths of heaven more easily than others. They wish 
especially to be called obedient, but not faithful. Tiiey say that Christians, be- 
cause they have the doctrines of faith, may be called faithful ; but not they, unless 
they receive it; or, as Ihey say, are al)lp to refoivo it." (IT. ^ TI. ^'20, A. C. '■2f>01.) 



p 



FREEDOM AND SLAVEKV. :J5 

merging every vestige of true humanity in tlie most b£ir- 
barous cannibalism. Now, although to us here, with our 
vision extended to very narrow limits, it may seem a great 
evil that innocent and well-disposed Africans — men, wo- 
men and children — should have been brought to this coun- 
try and sold into bondage to the whites ; yet this is a far less 
evil than that they should have been butchered and eaten, 
as captives in war, by their savage conquerors in their own 
country. It is certainly not a greater evil than that in- 
flicted upon Joseph by his brethrenr— his own flesh and 
blood — who sold him, through the Ishmaelites, into egyp- 
tian bondage. And may we not see that the bondage of 
Africans in this country is as much in the providence of 
the Lord for final good to Africa, as the bondage of the 
Children of Israel in Egypt was for the final good of the 
church of God in its restoration to Palestine ? The science 
of Egypt was indi:;;pensably necessary to that restoration. 
It was equally indispensable in that august restoring of 
lost humanity by God-witii-us, when he became "Jeho- 
vah our righteousness." And it ever will be indispensa- 
ble in the restoration of the celestial church. Wherefore, 
it has been, and still is, needed in the restoration of the 
celestial church throughout Africa. Its celesti-al centre 
needs a scientific reactive plain from Europe, or America, 
wdiich is Europe transplanted, to extend it to, and form 
it fully on, the sea coasts. Only in this way can the de- 
srenerate celestial character of Africa be restored through- 
out her borders. 

When the celestial church falls, the old or natural will 
is destroyed, and the understanding is separated from it 
and scientifically enlightened, so that a new will may be 
formed in the intellectual principle of the mind. For this 
purpose Africans of the better degenerate sort, have been 
sold, by their brethren of the worst degenerate sort, into 
slavery; and, in the Lord's permissive providence, have 



oi\ A DISCOURSE ON 

been brouglit to America as a relative Egypt. Here, by 
mingling with a more scientific, rational, intellectual and 
enlightened race, they are in the way of receiving that 
christian understanding of truth, which is necessary for 
the development, perfection and defence, in the circum- 
ference of Africa, of that celestial w^ill of good which is 
now nascent in its centre. The two-edged sw^ord of african 
intellect needs tempering and sharpening by european sci- 
ence to do effectual battle with the evils and falsities that 
depress and afflict, mankind. While here, the Africans 
must be the servants or slaves of the Europeans, because, 
in degenerate man, the darkened will must be subject to, 
and governed by, the enlightened understanding as a 
master. But, in the fullness of time, — and the purposes 
of a Good Providence seem now to be ripening fast, — the 
enlightened African, restored by colonization to his native 
land, will carry back those vital influences wdiich are to 
revivify his country, and cause her, perhaps, to 

"arise, 
The queen of the world, and the child of the skies" ! 

The black blood of Africa has been sent from her eastern 
celestial heart to these western countries as spiritual lungs. 
Here it is brought in contact with the air and ether of 
Christianity, to give out its effete earthly carbonaceous 
matters and take in the oxygen of heaven. And when it 
is thus sufficiently vitalized, it will by and by be seen to 
pour its encrimsoned flood refluent, for that potent arterial 
action, by which Humanitij will stand forth disenthralled, 
and, full developed in celestial purity and perfection, will 
stretch her arms from Afric's shores, in heavenly bene- 
diction, over a regenerated w^orld ! 

The part of true wisdom here, then, is to regard slavery 
in reference to this end. Viewed in this light, its amor- 
phous and unsightly stones become luminous and beau- 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 37 

teous with the prismatic hues, and fall into the orderly 
forms, of a heaven-directed kaleidescopal arrangement. 
Its evil becomes mellowed into good. And if the Ameri- 
can, knowing that a nation is not horn in a day, shall not 
spoil his work by impatience — if he shall work in faith 
while he waits in hope — if he shall look to the sure effec- 
tuation of high and holy ends by the gradual means of 
long protracted time — he will perform that work of ge- 
nuine charity, in such a sidtahle preparation of the african 
slave for the right use and enjoyment of natural, civil, 
social and political freedom, as shall doubly bless, both 
him that gives and him that receives it, when " the set 
time is full come " for the reception of the boon. 

Yes, we repeat, all nature is abhorrent to sudden" 
changes ! And slavery, as an hereditary natural evil, 
long developed in chronic disease, cannot possibly be cor- 
rected or cured in an instant. In demonstratino^ the evil 
of slavery, we have shown this already. But we must 
repeat what we said there, because it is essential to our 
argument here. African slavery has been gradually in- 
generated, and has gradually grown up, in long time ; 
and equally long time is requisite for its safe and thorough 
eradication from the body politic. Men who have been 
begotten and born slaves for a long course of years, can 
only be rebegotten and reborn freemen by the processes 
of correspondingly protracted reformation and regenera- 
tion. And hence the instantaneous manumission of the 
slave, and the sudden abolition of slavery, would be no 
less unkindness to the slave, than injustice to the commu- 
nity. That which distinguishes God from man, as well 
as assimilates man to God, is providence and providence. 
God foreknows or foresees all things, and incessantly pro- 
vides that good shall be done and evil be averted or re- 
strained. Man knows nothins^ or little of the future, 



38 A DISCO IJllSE ON 

and can but imperfectly provide for that little in the pre- 
sent. But so far as man resembles God, he comes into 
the enjoyment of intelligent foresight, and into the exer- 
cise of that wise prudence which consists in providing 
in the present for the future. • And herein the slave differs 
essentially from the freeman. Trusting to his master's 
foresight, and fed by his providings, he becomes himself 
improvident, and, only regarding his own pleasure in the 
present, he eats up all he has to-day, without laying by 
any thing for the morrow. Hence, if slaves are suddenly 
manumitted, and thrown out of the sphere and -patronage 
of intelligent and provident freemen, they ere long dete- 
reorate in character, become destitute and miserable in 
condition, and decrease in numbers. So that it is as un- 
kind and unmerciful to set a slave free at once, without 
preparing him gradually for the use and enjoyment of 
liberty, as it is to let loose a bird that has been hatched 
and reared in a cage, and constantly fed, and every way 
cared for, by the assiduous attentions of its human pos- 
sessor — in which case, it is well known that the creature 
perishes from its incapacity to take care of itself. 

Consequently, the true duty of America in regard to 
slavery, and her genuine charity to the African in the 
emancipation of him from it, must consist in all those 
constitutional provisions for the abolishment of the evil, 
which not only look to the emancipation of the slave in 
some future time, but shall also make it penally obligatory 
on his master* to qualify him, in the mean tinie, by suit- 

* We are aware how repugnant this must be to the principles and feelings of 
those who hold to the right of property in human beings, and how much it is 
ao-ainst what they now regard as their interests. But our agument is not ad- 
dressed to them. We too well know the fruitlessness of reasoning for truth and 
justice in those matters wherein the selfish and worldly interests of mankind are 
at stake. Our argument is addressed to those who, like Washington, Jefferson, 
Madison and Randolph, regard slavery as a civil and political evil which is to be 



FREEDOM AAD SLAVER'i . 39 

able education and the development of useful capacities, 
for the right and profitable use of freedom when it shall 
become his portion. Any thing short of this, would be 
unkindness to the slave, and injustice to the community. 

gradually worked out of the body politic by wise, prudent and prospective con- 
stitutional provisions. And the principle here involved is, that african bondage 
in this country is slavish apprenticeship. It is presumed that Africans have been 
suffered to come here, by Divine Providence, for their reformation and their coun- 
try's regeneration. The slave state, which alone has the power to determine 
■whether slavery shall or shall not be an institution of its polity, takes to itself, 
in its collective capacity, an entire wardship of the slaves. It touches not the 
right of individual property in any that are slaves now ; but it decrees that every 
child, begotten by slave parents after a certain period, shall be born free; and it 
apprentices the child so born, when nurtured and reared by its parents to a suit- 
able age, and properly educated at free schools to be established and maintained 
by the state for the purpose, to some master or mistress, either the owner of the 
parents, or some other person, as the case may seem to require and as may be 
agreeable to the owner — to learn some useful handicraft or occupation — to serve 
till thirty years of age, and then to receive a suit of clothes and enough money to 
take him or her to Africa — the state providing the means of, and securing, the 
transportation. It presumes that the value of the services of the apprentice to 
the master or mistress, during so long an apprenticeship, is a full equivalent for 
all he or she receives either before or at the day of freedom. And the only sa- 
crifice the slaveholder makes is of the institution of slavery — which he gives up 
for the good of the country — and of the increased value of the enfranchised work- 
man's services during the remainder of his life. It should be observed, however, 
that he as an individual has no just right to a value which has accrued from the 
state's emancipating measures; and, as an offset, he is relieved from the burden 
of maintaining the superannuated slave. Of course, there is no weight whatever 
in these observations, if african slavery in this country is a civil and political 
blessinor to both the blacks and the whites. But, if we mistake not the signs of 
the times, the days of slavery, in this and in all countries, are numbered- If there 
was a final general judgment in the spiritual world in the year 1757, as we be- 
lieve — if, in consequence of this, a new heavenly arrangement of Christians in 
that world has taken place — if from this new heaven a new and true christian 
church is now descending to earth — and if sevenfold light and heat, from the Sun 
of Heaven newly rising in the minds of all men, is pouring down upon all the 
marshy grrounds, foggy valleys and dark places of human degeneracy — then an 
explosive force, a mental, moral and spiritual nitric oxide compound, is generating, 
which will burst and dissipate into thin air the bonds of slavery wherever they 
exist ! And wo be to the hand that attempts to stay its rendings ! Yes, a decree, 
infinitely more irrevocable than that of the Medes and Persians, has gone forth, 
that, in due time, slavery in our southern states shall cease: and as well might 
a man try to prevent the explosion of a locomotive steam boiler by putting his 



40 A DISCOURSE OX 

Well, tlieii, may it be said to our countrymen — " If ye 
know these things, happy are ye if ye do them." They 
will be happy, not merely in getting rid of an evil which 
is endangering their political safety and social prosperity, 

arms round it, as the South atttempt to array herself against the fulfilment of this 
divine decree ! All her measures for perpetuating- slavery against the spirit of 
the present age, are gradually laj'ing a train which will thoroughly undermine 
her constitution, and ultimately explode to her inevitable destruction. And it is 
the part of true wisdom in her to provide this catastrophe, and to forfend it by 
the instant and constant provision of all requisite present and prospective means. 

In this view of the subject, we are satisfied that the true way is to regard slavery 
as a spiritual evil — as a counteraction of the laws of the Divine Governor of the 
Universe, who will have all men to come to the knowledge of the truth, and de- 
crees that tfie truth every where shall make them free! Therefore the abolition of 
slavery is not the work of the state or general government. It is a national work. 
It is the work of the people, the whole people. The people of America, as one 
man, are just as much bound to give money — each and every one of them a por- 
tion — to indemnify the slaveholder for the constitutional property which he gives 
up for the good of the nation, as they are to erect a monument to Washington. 
And they are bound to do it by voluntary contribution — not by government tax. 
The grand principle is, to develope a national virtue by a national act : and nei- 
ther the South, nor any other part of the nation, has a right, in divine justice, to 
monopolize the virtue by assuming the action wholly to itself. If the South per- 
mits and decrees it, it is the duty of the american church to educate and prepare 
the children of the slaves for freedom, and, if necessary, to purchase them for the 
purpose. In our humble opinion, this is a more incumbent and a more noble 
charity than civilizing and christianizing the Indians, or sending missionaries to 
the Heathen of foreign lands. And it is just as feasible for all the christian sects 
to unite in this work, as in printing and publishing the Sacred Scriptures without 
note or comment. When the offspring of the slaves are prepared for freedom, it 
will be the work of the american people, in their collective capacity, to send them 
to Africa. 

No plan of preparing the slaves for freedom will be effectual, which is not 
founded upon marriage. We must improve the african race as the races of ani- 
mals are improved. Marriage among the blacks should be most strictly regulated 
by wise rules. No adult apprentice that is morally vicious or physically de- 
formed or diseased, should be allowed to marry at all. Marriage should be 
allowed to the apprentices only as a reward of exemplary virtue, piety and true 
religion; they should not be allowed to contract it before the age of twenty-five 
in the male and twenty in the female ; and when married they should be set up 
in business, and taught to discharge with propriety the duties of the family rela- 
tion in near proximity to the families of their masters, and under their intelligent 
and paternal supervision. Thus will young families be prepared for Africa. And 
by crossing the various tribes, as well as by"pairing the more noble and generous 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 41 

but, what is far more desirable, they will be happy in 
that political, civil and moral elevation of character which 
results from a high and noble nature brought into full 
form and vigor by the long-continued and consistent ex- 
sorts, vast improvements of the race in general might be effected. Of course, 
there should be nothing arbitrary or capricious in these allotments : but a free and 
rational restraining of passions, and guiding of inclinations, by sensible advice, 
moral suasion, and kindly authority, as in the best regulated modes of society 
among the whites. The affinities and drawings of interior conjugial affections 
must never be outraged by the forced determinations of factitious law or abitrary 
authority. Perhaps those who ought not to intermarry, should never be thrown 
together, either in the school room, the place of labor or the plain of recreation. 
This would prevent early attachments among such as ought not to be united in 
wedlock. It might be difficult to draw the line marking properly the degree of 
moral or physical defect prohibitory of marriage. But there would be no field for 
wisdom to exercise herself in, if there were no difficulties ; and this difficulty, true 
wisdom could easily overcome. In the case of ideots, the principle and the case are 
manifest. And it only seems hard, that those who are physically deformed or 
diseased — so as to be impotent, or to be able to have only a physically degenerate 
progeny — should be debarred from the sweets of conjugial and domestic life, 
when they are possessed of the higher order of mental powers and virtues. But 
this is a case for that species of noble self-denial, which has led superior minds 
of the white race, tainted, for instance, with hereditary insanity, to doom them- 
selves to celibacy, or to immolate themselves on the altar of their country's bat- 
tle-field, that they might die childless, and so stop the propagation of a defective 
form of humanity. It is clear, that the african race, like any other, cannot be 
radically, thoroughly and highly improved, without wise and intelligent regard 
to the marriage principle as here suggested. And it must never be forgotten, that 
any decided elevation of the african character by these means, must only be looked 
for in long courses of time, and by the most gradual steps of ascent. 

Nor will any plan for abolishing african slavery in the southern states be prac- 
ticable, which does not contemplate radical changes in the manners, customs and 
entire social economy of the whites. This, indeed, is the great and inherent dif- 
ficulty of the subject. For it is almost impossible to make communities give up 
principles of pride, which underlay their honor, and to submit to entire changes 
of their social organization, however gradual and prospective they may be. Nay, 
they at once resist the inceptive measure in strongest opposition to its final result. 
Therefore all theories for the abolition of slavery are chimerical which do not rest 
on organic changes of the slave communities, brought about by their own free 
and rational action in giving up former principles and adopting new ones, that alone 
can sustain an unmixed and politically and socially equal population in the vari- 
ous relations of mutual and reciprocal service. The hands and the head of the 
South must be washed, before she can be made every whit clean by tlie washing 



42 A DISCOURSE ON 

ercise of great virtues. God grant that our country may, 
in this respect, enjoy the exceedingly precious blessing 
of his divine favor! 

of her feet. There must be as great a change in the character of the whites as of 
the blacks in preparing the state for so radical a metamorphosis. White children 
must be reared and educated on different principles. The notion that a white man 
is degraded by doing a negro's work, must be exploded : for in a homogeneous 
and truly free community there is no negro's work to be done. The idea that it 
is more honorable or respectable to receive service from others than to render it to 
them, must be dissipated at once. This is the corner-stone of feudalism and of 
imperious sway. It is both anti-republican and anti-christian. The christian 
maxim is a political truth — " it is better to give than to receive " service. Higher 
and lower service, in wider and narrower spheres of usefulness, is the only hono- 
rable distinction in a true republic as in the true church : and the instruments of 
low and common labor must be relatively the community's own foot, and not an 
African's neck under it. Then will even low and common labor be dignified 
with all the honor of the whole body. The community will regard its common 
laborer with some thing of the feeling of a father who kisses with fond affection 
the tiny foot of his prattling infant, or of a man who admires the well formed 
foot of the woman that he loves. In the w^ords of an apostle, the community can 
then practically say — " our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness ; for 
our comely parts have no need : but God hath tempered the body together, hav- 
ing given more abundant honor to that part which lacked : that there should be no 
schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care one for an- 
other: and whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it ; or one 
member be honored, all the members rejoice with it." (1 Cor., xii., 23-26.) 
When labor is thus dignified, and the laborer is thus honored, in the South, then 
there will be no difficulty in abolishing slavery there. Free white men will freely 
go thither to do the work that is now done by slaves. Small property holders 
will more divide the soil. Other sources of wealth will be developed. New 
kinds of business will be set on foot, requiring a greater variety of labor and of 
talent. The present vast and almost exclusive production of cotton, rice and 
sugar will undergo great modifications — lessening in amount, indeed, and so 
ceasing to enrich the few, but conspiring with a greater variety of productions to 
enrich the many, and, by multiplying a greater number of kinds of wealth and 
aggregating a greater total from very many small amounts of wealth, to increase 
vastly in quality and degree the prosperity of the commonwealth. And as all this 
is to take place gradually, in long courses of time, afforded by the gradual prepa- 
ration of the black population for an advantageous removal to Africa, there may 
be such a slow and quiet infiltration of white laborers into the renewed and bet- 
tered forms of society, ^ja/v' passu with the black laborers' leaving them, as will 
not only save the institutions of the states from any kind of convulsive or injurious 
change, but give to them the solidity, transparency and polish of a sort of social 
petrifaction. 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. . 43 



But it is far more incumbent on us to regard spiritual 
freedom, as a good, in contrast with spiritual slavery, as 
an evil. Our text teaches us, that spiritual slavery is the 
bondage of sin; and spiritual freedom is the service of 
the Lord. The service of the Lord is perfect freedom. 
For the Lord is love and wisdom itself; and what a man 
does from love by wisdom is most spontaneous and free. 
Wisdom is good mform, that is, truth made good by vir- 
tuous activity. Love is good in essence, that is, essential 
good formed and qualified by the truth which corresponds 
to it. The service of wisdom is the obedience of its pre- 
cepts — is the doing of truth for truth's sake. This service 
is always the more or less constrained subjection of the 
natural to the spiritual man: because truth "reproves 
the world of sin" — condemns the natural man's evils, and 
requires the spiritual man to renounce them. And this 
service is the result of divine reformation. The service 
of love is the spontaneous doing of good for goodness' 
sake; and is the result of divine regeneration. 

Now the service of wisdom or truth, is> formal, and the 
service of love or good, is essential, freedom. For, as man 
obeys the precepts of wisdom, he comes into the experi- 
mental or vital understanding of truth, in consequence of 
putting away from his life all the evil of false principles; 
and thus is delivered from the bondag^e of sin, so as to 
become the Lord's freeman, by spiritually constrained 
action. For all obedience of truth, which subjects man's 
selfish and worldly loves to the behests of divine and spi- 
ritual love, is at first undelightful, because a cross to the 
natural man: yet still it is freedom; because, although a 
man is a slave when forced by others, he is most truly or 
formally free when he forces himself. This, therefore, is 
what we call formal freedom; because trutli is the form 



44 A DISCOURSE ON 

of all things that are in order, while good is the essence of 
all things that are in use. 

But the service of love is man's spontaneous action 
from the ruling end of doing good to others for their own 
sakes. So far as a man acts consistently from this end, 
he comes himself into the enjoyment and living percep- 
tion of the good which he seeks to do to others. In the 
delight of making others happy, he is most happy him- 
self. Hence, in the love of good for its own sake is 
essential delight; and therefore essential freedom; for 
whatever is done with delight, or whatever produces de- 
light in the doing it, is most freely done — the essence of 
freedom being the happiness of delightful emotions with 
their calm and peaceful content. 

On the other hand, "in the love of evil is [essential] 
servitude;" and the essence of slavery is the misery of 
undeliffhtful emotions with their restless discontent. For 
the love of evil, that is, the love of self and the world as 
final ends of action, constantly tends, in its activity, to 
injure others, instead of doing them good. Thus it runs 
counter to all the laws of the divine economy. Conse- 
quently, it is perpetually subject to the counteraction of 
those laws. In short, the universal law of the divine 
economy is, that evil shall react upon itself for its own 
correction. So that, whenever evil goes forth in any of 
its corresponding activities, it comes, more or less imme- 
diately, into bonds : while, nevertheless, the yearnings of 
its infernal desires are int^reased in the ratio of the re- 
straining weights which are made to impend upon them 
— as smothered fires burn with a more intense heat. All 
a man who is actuated by evil love does, is attended with 
misery, in order that his action from that love may be 
restrained. Hence, in action from that love, there is the 
veriest servitude or slavery. For, as that which a man 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 45 

does with delight is free ; so that which a man does with 
misery is constrained. There is, indeed, an infernal de- 
light at first in the commission of evil : but it is invariably 
followed by corresponding misery in the reactions upon 
it. The activities of an evil love gnaw as a deathless 
worm, and burn as a quenchless fire. Constantly urged 
to work, and yet flogged as with scorpions when he has 
worked, the man of evil passions is subjected to the most 
galling task, and the most relentless taskmaster. The 
activities of evil love produce, in the substance of the 
human soul, or in man's spiritual body, a sort of cancer- 
ous diathesis, which breaks out in " putrefying sores." 
(Isa., i., 6.) The delights of this evil love are as the 
itching of these cancerous sores, and as the pleasure felt 
in their friction. But the pain which follows such fric- 
tion, and the increased cancerous action consequent on 
the greater afiiux of blood and nervous fluid to the part, 
emblem too truly the bondage and burden of sin. And 
so it is that " in the love of evil there is servitude." 

And they who are in such servitude can never come 
into good, so as to feel delight in doing it purely for its 
own sake : thus cannot enter into heaven wdiich consists 
in that delight, and which is only open to those who are 
in divine truth by obedience to its precepts. And so it 
is that " the servant of sin abideth not in the house for 
ever." 

But "the son abideth for ever." If, then, ''the son 
shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.'" The son 
is the divine truth. The house, in which this abides for 
ever, is the good which it incessantly effects. The thought 
of the mind dwells constantly on and in what the man 
loves to do. The thought, flowing from the will and 
aff"ection of the love, brings them out into corresponding 
form and activity in the speech and action. And in the 



46 A DISCOURSE ON 

speech and action which correspond to it, the end or pnr- 
pose of the love finds a fundament, continent and resting 
place, so as to give to the love therein " a local habitation 
and a name." It was thus that the divine love, in the 
Lord's glorification of his humanity, found a thorough 
outbirth and permanent abode. And it is ever thus that 
the divine truth from him, flowing by reformation and 
regeneration into the souls of men, causes them to abide 
in the good that corresponds to it. And so it is that 
"tlie son abideth in the house for ever." 

In explaining the portion of the Holy Word before us, 
our church teaches the following clear and satisfactory 
doctrine : 

" He who acts in any case from the affection which is of the love of good, acts 
from a free principle ; but he who acts from the affection which is of the love of 
evil, appears to act from a free principle, but in reality does not, because he acts 
from the lusts which flow in from hell. He alone is free who is in the affection 
of good; because he is led of the Lord. That freedom consists in being led of 
the Lord, and servitude in being led of lusts wiiich are from hell," must be 
manifest to all spiritual discernment; "for the Lord implants affections in favor 
of what is good, and aversion to what is evil. Hence to do good is freedom, and 
to do evil is altogether servile. He who believes that christian liberty has a 
further extent, is very much deceived." (A. C. 9096.) 

" When man's internal principle [or the spiritual man] conquers, as is the case 
when it has reduced the external [principle or the natural man] to agreement or 
compliance [with itself,] then man is endowed by the Lord with essential liberty 
and essential rationality; for then man is rescued by the Lord from infernal 
liberty, which in itself is [the veriest] servitude, and is introduced into celestial 
liberty, which in itself is essential freedom, and has consociation granted him 
with the angels." (Ap, Ex. 409-) 

Thus the Lord teaches us by this text "that they are 
servants [or slaves] who are in sins ; and that he makes 
those free who, by the Word, receive truth from him." 
Consequently, when the Jews, in reply to his saying, 
"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you 
free," " answered him. We are the seed of Abraham, and 
were never in bondage to any one ; how sayest thou. Ye 
shall be made free?" &c. &c. — 



FREEDOIM AND SLAVERY. 47 

" By these words is understood, that freedom consists in being led of the 

Lord, and that servitude consists in being led of hell. By truth which makcsfree, 
is meant the divine truth which is from the Lord ; for he who receives that truth 
in doctrine and in life is free [indeed] ; because he becomes spiritual, and is led 
of the Lord. Wherefore, also, it is said, that the son ahideth in the house for ever, 
and if the son mahes you free, you shall he free indeed j where by the son is meant 
the Lord, and likewise truth; and to abide in the house, denotes [to dwell] in 
heaven. That to be led of hell is servitude, is taught by these words, every one 
who doeth sin is the servant of sin ; where sin denotes hell, because sin is from 
hell." (Ap. Ex. 409.) 

"All that is called freedom which is of the will — thus which is of the love: 
and hence it is that freedom manifests itself by the delight of willing and of 
thinking; and hence of doing and of speaking; for all delight is of love, and all 
love is of the will, and the will is the esse of the life of man." (A. C. 9585.) 

This is the reason that, in all contests for political liberty 
with arbitrary powers, the first and chief thing fonght 
for, is liberty of speech and freedom of action; and this 
is the reason why despots, whenever they are enslaving 
a people, silence the press by their censorship and impair 
freedom of speech and action by their fines and penalties. 

" To do evil from the delight of love, appears to be freedom; but it is servi- 
tude, because it is from hell. To do good from the delight of love, both appears 
to be and really is freedom, because it is from the Lord. Servitude, therefore, 
consists in being led of hell, and freedom in being led of the Lord." (A. C. 8586.) 

Such is the Lord's doctrine in onr text. And how 
clearly does it teach lis that, '^ if the son makes ns free, 
we sJiall he free indeed" ! 

To what has been advanced it may be added, that to 
do evil from the delight of evil, appears to be freedom 
only to the mere natural man; and to do good from the 
delight of love, appears to be freedom only to the spiritual 
man. To the natural man, — especially the corporeal and 
sensual man, — the doing good from the delight of love, 
' seems preposterous; and any obligation he may feel under 
to do it, seems to him a galling yoke and a fearful bondage. 
But if, in faith, he obeys the truth of God unto the entire 



48 A DISCOURSE ON 

renunciation of all action from every evil love, the Lord, 
by charity, or spiritual love, implants in him a spiritual 
affection for truth and goodness, and so lightens the bur- 
den which spiritual truth imposes on his natural man. 
And then he realizes the blessedness of the Lord's divine 
injunction and assurance — " Come unto me, all ye that 
labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take 
my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am rneek and 
lowly in heart ; and ye shall find rest unto your souls. 
For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." (Matt., 
xi., 28-30.) 

Our subject is full-fraught with lessons of practical 
wisdom in respect to what it becomes us, as a nation, to 
know and to do, for the preservation of our own country's 
liberties, and for the universal political good of all other 
nations. It unfolds to us the nature of slavery in its es- 
sential or internal form, as an evil far more to be dreaded, 
and far more to be eschewed, than that external form of 
it which is now so much exciting the imaginary fears, 
and the spurious philanthropies, of outside patriots. In 
short, it unfolds to us the nature of slavery as the root 
and branch of all arbitrary power. And, in its wise mo- 
nitions, it points to duty the only pathway to our coun- 
try's safety, our domestic peace and our individual hap- 
piness. Let us, then, in a commemoration of the birth- 
day of that great and good man, whom our Heavenly 
Father mercifully raised up and sustained as a focal point 
of his own divine energies in working out for our coun- 
try her happy exemption from arbitrary dominion and 
oppressive political sway, make a practical improvement 
of the principles set forth in this discourse. 

Let us first contemplate the spectacle which our poli- 
tical birth-right presents. Let us consider its probable 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 49 

influence on the nations of the old world. Let us ponder 
well the obligations which it imposes on us as Americans. 
And let us, at some length and in a varied form of pre- 
sentation, consider again, and more summarily, the true 
nature of freedom and slavery — to the end that we may 
see more clearly, and feel more strongly, our duty as 
Americans of the New Jerusalem. 

It is not three quarters of a century since political free- 
dom had her birth-day in the broad and lovely expanse 
of this new-found world. A nation, conceived of God by 
a general judgment in the world of spirits, gestated in 
"times that tried men's souls," was brought forth in the 
feeblest infancy of political existence. The United States 
of America were declared a free and independent nation. 
The prestige of greatness and of glory shone as a halo 
around the head of the new-born babe. The best of blood 
was in its veins. It owned the pedigree of virtuous and 
mighty sires. A scion of a great and glorious stock, trans- 
planted to a more genial soil, was to grow with greater 
growth, flourish with new vigor, and fructify in a vastly 
greater development of all that pertains to and secures the 
best interests of mankind. 

The nations of Europe, stereotyped in the flxed forms 
of immemorial usage, could not be reformed and regene- 
rated with a political new-birth without being broken up, 
melted over, and cast into a new mould. There was no 
space large enough, in any general division of that old 
contiftient, to hold the mould of the NEW MAN — that 
better, greater, grander form of political humanity, which 
God, in his mercy, designed and deigned to bring forth, 
and rear up, as the Atlas, upon whose shoulders was to 
be upborne all national existence, virtue and prosperity. 
A new continent, v/liich the Lord had hid in the treasure- 
7 



50 A DISCOURSE ON 

house of this western hemisphere, was, in the fullness of 
his times, discovered and brought forth. Here, where 
the towering Andes, Cordilleras and Rocky Mountains 
stretch, for nearly half the arc of a great circle, the huge 
back-bone of a mighty frams — here, where giant rivers 
hurl herculean floods to bottomless oceans on every side 
— where lakes are seas like mighty wild beasts caged in 
rocky barriers — where boundless prairies, like mantles 
studded with Flora's many-colored gems, are spread, as 
royal robes, over the shoulders of Nature, sitting queen 
and nursing mother of a countless progeny of nations — 
where vegetation springs up in giant growths — where 
trees grow higher and thicker, skies stretch wider, and 
every thing puts on the dimensions of greater magnitude, 
than any where else in the world — here, and here alone, 
could the mould of a newer, truer and better humanity 
be formed for the recasting into better political shapes 
all the old nations of the world. In short, here alone 
could a mighty republic of confederated nations present 
the adequate forms, magnitudes, symmetries and perfec- 
tions of a national maximus liomo ! 

And hither have the old world's migrating myriads 
come, like different kinds of food into a healthy political 
stomach, to be digested into the new and better conditions 
of improved bodies politic. And as these foreigners have 
died, and their spirits have risen into the spiritual world, 
their reflex influence from the world of spirits, has put 
the leaven into the old world, so that the whole lump of 
european nations is undergoing a thorough fermentation, 
and the batch is risino^ into the new forms of regenerated 
political existence. The spirit of truth, flowing down, 
as hot water, through new arrangements of the spirits of 
men in the spiritual world, is cracking the painted and 
gilded porcelain forms of ancient political organization, 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 51 

or is slacking the calcined crystallizations of long fixed 
political elements, every where in the old world — so as, 
by various disintegration, to tit them for new political 
combinations in this land of expanding intelligence and 
rational freedom. Here decrepit political humanity was 
to find a fulfilment of prophecy; and, "waiting upon 
the Lord," was to "renew her strength," to "mount up 
with wings as eagles,''^ ^ to "run and not be weary," and to 
" walk and not faint." 

And the infant form of this now adult mighty model 
for all other nations, was ushered into life, with excruci- 
ating parturient pains, only about seventy-three years ago. 
Not more than a century and a quarter has elapsed since 
the buds first swelled on our tree of liberty. The one hun- 
dred and eighteenth anniversary of the birth of him who 
was preeminently the individual type of the new and true 
humanity in its civil and political form, has just passed, 
and to-day leads our minds to the religious contemplation 
of the subject of that civil freedom which he was so fa- 
vored an agent of the Lord our God in effecting for our 
now happy country. We say this is a subject meet for 
religious contemplation ; because this area of civil freedom 
in America, was a needful plain for a fuller development 
of that spiritual freedom which consists in the deliverance 
of the spirits of all mankind from the thraldom of sin. 
And oh how much does it behoove us ever to bear in 
wisely and intelligently practical commemoration an 
event so pregnant with blessings to ourselves and to all 
men ! Oh with what fervid tones of all our best affections 
should we offer up our thanks to our Father in the Hea- 
vens for the great boon of such a man — not merely to our 

* It is believed that tlie standards, flags, or armorial bearings of nations corre- 
spond in some way to their distinctive internal characters, and mark their peculiar 
places, so to speak, in the grand man of this lower world. 



')'Z A DISCOURSE ON 

country, but to the world ! And let us by no means for- 
get the instructions of the divine truth, which has so clearly 
taught us, in our text, the true nature of that freedom 
— that deliverance from arbitrary power — which, in its 
political phasis, he was the divinely appointed leading 
means of working out for us and our remotest posterity ! 
Let us not turn our backs on the angel of light which has 
herein so fully shown us the obligations we are under to 
preserve this freedom in its purity for the welfare of our 
own and of all other nations ! 

Will you, then, allow me still further to trespass on 
your patience, already too much taxed, while I recapitu- 
late, in a varied form of presentation, what has been taught 
us in respect to the nature of freedom ? It becomes us — 
it is our duty — in practical reflection upon what has been 
advanced, to consider this, so that our souls may more 
fully imbibe the spirit and the life of that true freedom, 
and impart to our country and to mankind the saving 
efficacy of its healthful influences : while we, at the same 
time, scrutinize more particularly the true nature of that 
internal slavery which we have seen is an evil so much 
to be dreaded and avoided ; so that we may practically, 
not only theoretically, discern its essence and its source, 
and, by seeing in ourselves, individually, the root of all 
arbitrary power, that root of bitterness, we may effectually 
pluck it up from our own bosoms, and cast it from us ; 
and thus do all we can to save our country and all men 
from its fatal sproutings. 

What, then, do we learn, or have we learned, from the 
teachings of God's Word, and the doctrines of his church, 
as to the true idea of freedom and slavery ? 

If there is any one word which expresses the true idea 
of freedom, it is equilihriitm. The common notion is, 



FREEDOIM AND SLAVERY. 53 

that a man is free when he has the power and liberty to 
do what he likes. This, indeed, as our lesson has taught 
us, is natural freedom. For action is free when it is ac- 
cording to the ruling love. What a man loves to do, that 
he does with delight; and when one is allowed to do 
w^hat is delightful to him without any let or hindrance, 
his life seems to him unconstrained, and therefore free. 
Hence all freedom must have a quality according to the 
character of the love from which it springs. And thus 
natural freedom, being the unrestrained activity of natural 
love, takes its quality, its form and its hue from natural 
love. But natural love is the love of self, or the love of 
dominion over others; with the love of wealth as the 
means of obtaining it. And the unrestrained activity of 
self-love among men would be the liberty to bring all men 
into subjection to one man, and the power and right to 
appropriate and possess all their property. And this, it 
is easy to see, would be universal slavery. For, when 
one man had subjected all other men to him, they would 
be all his slaves ; and he would be the greatest slave of 
them all, because he would be a slave to himself: for no 
man is so much a slave as he who cannot act contrary to 
his own natural passions. 

To love oneself above all things, and to act invariably 
with a view to one's own gratification, is essential sin. 
For sin is contrariety to divine order ; and the order in 
which God creates man is to love others as well as or 
better than himself, and to find his happiness in all those 
acts of good use to other men by which he makes them 
happy. Hence the essence of sin is to act against the love 
of others and the love of promoting the common good. 
Thus self-love, which is active in the love of dominion 
and seeks its own gratification in subjecting all other men 
to itself, is essential sin. And the servant of this sin is 



54 A DISCOURSE ON 

the essential slave. We have thus arrived at a point from 
which we see the nature of slavery and discern its essence 
and its source. 

Hence comes the disposition to have and to exercise all 
arbitrary power. This, in the individual man, makes him 
self-willed or determined to have his own way, dictatorial 
and overbearing in his conduct to others, and most cruel 
in his treatment of them, if they in any way thwart him 
in the attainment of his ends, or do not prove subsequient 
and subservient to him in the gratification of his desires. 
It leads the politician to fawn and flatter the people until, 
wafted by the breath of popular favor to the pinnacles of 
chief power, he can exercise dominion over them and 
enact the tyrant. It leads the people themselves to the 
worst of all tyrannies, when they substitute their blind 
will for the law which is divine justice. "He," says the 
doctrine of our church, " w^ho regards himself as above 
the law, places royalty in himself, and either believes 
himself to be the law, or the law, which is justice, to be 
derived from himself. Hence he arrogates to himself 
that which is divine — to which, nevertheless, he ought to 
be in subjection." And "the king who lives according 
to the law, and therein sets an example to his subjects, is 
truly a king." But "a king who has absolute power, 
and believes that his subjects are such slaves that he has 
a right to their possessions and lives, and exercises such 
a right, is not a king but a tyrant." (H. D.) 

Such is the doctrine of our church in regard to tyran- 
ny — expressed indeed in respect to kingly government ; 
but involving the principle of tyranny in respect to all 
governments, even that of a republic, or democracy, in 
w^iich the people, as a vast collective man, are regarded as 
the sovereign, exercising a sort of self government. And 
hence we see that the essence of tyranny consists in putting 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 55 

selfish will above just laws, and in making the will of 
man the source of government instead of the justice of 
God. So that, when the mere wdll of the people, in the 
form and organization of any collective man, is put above 
the law, or is regarded as the law% or is deemed the source 
from whence the law is derived, there is the greatest and 
the most perfect tyranny, because it is the tyranny of a 
vast collective man instead of that of an individual man. 
Hence the outbursts of popular will, not only in the vari- 
ous forms of mobile violence, but also in the bearino- down 
of capricious public opinion, are often the most detestable 
exercises of arbitrary power, and present the very worst 
form of that despotism w^iich springs from the sway of 
unbridled self-love. 

The same principle leads nations to all those acts of 
aggression by which one is subjected to the power of an- 
other, and those who exercise power in each, can have 
the means of exerting arbitrary sway over those who are 
dependent on them. We all know, or have been informed, 
how the love of dominion from the love of self impelled 
the mother country to oppress her cis-atlantic colonies — 
to aggrandize herself at their expense — to tax them against 
their will and without fair representation in a legislature 
of their own — and most oppressively to burden them by 
the unjust exactions of arbitrary and mercenary govern- 
ors. And we well know how the reactions of a free spirit 
upon these oppressions of the mother country, roused our 
forefathers to the war of our revolution, nerved them to 
maintain it, for eight long years, by the most inadequate 
means, against the best appointed forces, and enabled 
them to wade through fire and blood to that consumma- 
tion of a free, prosperous, great and happy political exist- 
ence which it is now our blest privilege to enjoy ! 

We see, then, what true freedom is, by discerning most 



56 A DISCOURSE ON 

clearly what it is not. The liberty of the natural man to 
do as he pleases is not true freedom. It is the quintes- 
sence of slavery. It is the liberty of the selfish man to 
make all others subservient to himself. The upshot of 
which is, that all become slaves to him, and he becomes 
slave to himself, because he has no power, in the free vo- 
lition, or in the equilibrations of a rational mind, to con- 
trol the burstings forth of his own ungovernable passions 
— which, however controlled by external restraints, such 
as the fears of the loss of life, of honor, of wealth, or of 
power, are but the pent fires of a furious volcano, that 
ever and anon break forth in burning and desolating 
lavas! "Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of 
sin." 

On the other hand, the best and truest teacher assures 
us — " If the son shall make you free, ye shall be free in- 
deed." Our church has taught us, in what is gone before, 
that the son is that divine truth which is the form, the 
effigy, the express image of all that is good. It is the 
brightness of the glory of love — that love which delights 
in doing good to others simply with a view to their hap- 
piness, and without selfish regard to any recompense. 
It is the form of that order which ensues when the wild 
impulses of the natural or selfish man without, are brought 
into subjection to the clear rational dictates of the spirit- 
ual man within. It is that order which ensues when a 
man, from the end to good in the adytum of his soul, can 
stand firm on the clear mountain top of rational convic- 
tion of duty, and, while he sees the gust of natural pas- 
sion, rolling in dense and black masses, flashing and 
thundering and rending all below, can determine to do 
what is right because it is right, and can bow down and 
serve the common good, even at the severest sacrifice of 
all the natural heart holds most dear, because the com- 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERV. 57 

mon good is and should be paramount to all individual 

interests. 

Thus the essence of freedom lies in the exact balancinor 
of the natural man on the one hand, by the spiritual man 
on the other. True freedom is equilibrium. It is a state 
in the body politic like to sound health in the physical 
body. For, in health, every part of the body is nicely 
balanced. The pulse, which is the index of the body's 
health, is regular. Whenever the pulse is too fast or too 
slow, too strong or too feeble, it is a sure symptom of 
disease. And the basis of that health of the body 
which consists in the equilibrium of all its parts, is the 
great law that each part acts in its respective province 
for the good of the whole and not for its own gratification. 
Thus the eye sees — the ear hears — the nose smells — the 
tongue tastes — the hands procure and convey food, and 
the legs hold up the body or make it locomotive, each and 
all, for the good of the whole, and not for their own gra- 
tification. Each is sustained by the commonwealth, and 
is made happy from the common stock of happiness. 
Whenever any part begins, as it were, to think of and act 
for itself, that instant the equilibrium of the other parts 
is disturbed, and disease commences. Thus, for instance, 
when the bones, which, when in health, have little or no 
feeling in them, become inflamed, they are exquisitely 
painful, and, by drawing an undue sympathy from the 
other parts, taking the blood from the heart and the 
nervous energy from the brain which should be given 
and exerted for the common good, and concentering them 
upon themselves, they lay the whole body prostrate on 
the bed of sickness. So of the eye, when it is inflamed, 
and there is an undue congestion of blood in it, the whole 
equilibrium of the body is destroyed, and every other 
member, and the body as a whole, is powerless in its 
8 



58 A J)LS(:OURSE ON 

united and harmonious action for the common good. In 
short, the body is no longer free, when the self-love of 
any of its parts destroys the equilibrium which should 
reign in all its parts. And so it is that self-love is essen- 
tially destructive of all freedom : and, we may add, of all 
true federal union among independent states. But as 
this subject has been fully discussed on another occasion 
and in another place, it will not be entered upon here.* 

If, therefore, we would be free indeed, either as indi- 
viduals or as a nation, we must extract this root of bitter- 
ness from our souls, our minds and all our conduct. The 
mathematical axiom, that the whole is equal to the sum 
of its parts, applies to our country. Such as is the cha- 
racter of the individual men or states who compose it, 
such will be the character and quality of the whole coun- 
try. Its common wealth is the aggregate of its indivi- 
dual wealths. Its common virtue is the aggregate of its 
individual virtues. Its common power, prosperity and 
happiness, depend solely upon the intelligence, the virtue 
and the true patriotism of its component parts. In view, 
then, of our country's freedom, greatness and true glory, 
the great lesson we have to learn, the great duty we have 
to do, is the careful heeding, by each one, of the wise 
monition "Physician, heal thyself!" No people can 
ever be oppressed by tyrants who are not themselves 

* A good deal was said, here and in other parts of the discourse, in the way 
of illustration of the general principle by its application to the family circle and 
to the country at large; and it would, doubtless, be useful'to some of the readers 
of this discourse if what was thus said could be seen in its connection : but these 
things are among the extemporaneous matters which the author finds it impossi- 
ble now to recall ; and, if he could, he would be loth to insert them, on account 
of the too great size to which his additions have now swelled this production. 
Any wishing to see the subject above alluded to expanded, may read his printed 
new-year's sermon entitled "The True Nature of National Union and Pros- 
-perity," which may be procured, where the few remaining copies of this discourse 
will be for sale, at E. Ferrett & Co.'s, 40 South Fourth Street, Philadelphia. 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 59 

individually influenced by the principle of tyranny. All 
arbitrary or bad government is salutary reaction upon 
the evils of the governed ; and the only effectual way to 
get rid of the bad government is for the governed, each 
from himself, to remove the evils on which it is permitted 
to react. Americans as a people never can be enslaved 
while they are individually free! This grand truth ap- 
plies as well to the individual states in our great confe- 
deracy as to the individual men in our great nation. If 
each state is itself free from all injustice in its individual 
polity, and, like some particular member of the human 
body, acts for the common good of all the states in the 
healthy equilibrium of a well balanced deference and 
subordination of its partial to their general interests, it 
is impossible that any one state can ever be oppressed by 
the rest, or ever domineer over them. The only thing 
that can ever impair the freedom of the collective as of 
the individual man, is some one preferring and seeking 
its own interest at the expense of the common good. 
Therefore, in all civil and political sickness, the grand 
maxim, in reforming abuses, is, " Physician, heal thy- 
self!" Especially, Heal thyself, American People ! 
Let each and every one put away his own evils as sins against 
the common good! If every individual or collective Ame- 
rican acts on this principle, so as to deny himself, take 
up his cross daily, and follow the Great Physician of 
Souls in laying down his life for the brethren, then our 
beloved country cannot fail to be every thing one would 
wish her to be — prosperous, great and happy ! 

This, then, is true patriotism. In this age, when al- 
most every thing is got up for the people, here is patriot- 
ism for the people, in contradistinction to the patriotism 
of their rulers or servants. It is the best sort of patriot- 
ism for the servants too — the patriotism of self-sacrifice. 



GO A DISCOURSE ON 

It is not confined to the tented field, the post of high 
honor, the arena of glory, of danger, or of death. The 
secluded and quiet shades of domestic life are its theatre 
as well as the halls of Legislation or the plains of execu- 
tive power. This is patriotism for the female as well as 
the male — in which she can excel, and rise preeminent 
in glory. For whether she be daughter, sister, wife, or 
mother, she can not only sacrifice herself for the best 
good of her country, but she can infuse the spirit of self- 
sacrifice, in its purest forms, into men of every degree. 
The woman gives man his body in the sacrifice of her- 
self, and she may infuse spirit and life into his soul by 
the same means. How much do we owe our love of coun- 
try to our mothers ! How manifestly did the mother of 
Washington infuse into him his patriotism! And every 
true woman and good mother can make a patriot of her 
son, by teaching him the lessons, and early inuring him 
to the duties, of self-sacrifice. She may not prove her love 
of country by pouring out her physical blood in gather- 
ing encrimsoned laurels on the field of earthly fame ; but 
she can more fully prove it by co-working with the Spirit 
of God, in silence and in secret, when he curiously fa- 
shions, in the lower parts of the earth, all the members 
of the human soul into the image and likeness of his own 
self-denying virtues, by the innocence of infancy and the 
noble impulses and the generous fellow-feelings of youth! 
Yes, true patriotism is self-denial — is self-sacrifice! 
This is true devotion. This is that sacrifice of our own 
lives — that pouring out of our own blood — that giving of 
our own treasure — by which our beloved country wall be 
most effectually served and secured in all her best and 
dearest and most lasting interests! Yes, my brethren, in 
whatever time, place, circumstance or duty — when the 
altar is set for the sacrifice to be bound with cords to its 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 61 

horns — the wood to be set in order upon it — and we have 
come to invoke the fire from heaven that is to kindle it, 
and to offer np the incense of our holy worship at the 
shrine of our country's good — the sacrifice we are to make 
is the sacrifice of ourselves — the incense we are to off"er 
is the burning odor of broken and contrite hearts — the 
offering we are to heave is the faithful discharge of every 
known duty, in public or private life, from a supreme 
regard to God and our neighbor, which is the seeking, in 
all things, to promote the common interest by the surren- 
dering or subordinating thereto of every and all partial 
and individual interests. This is that straight gate — this 
that narrow way — through which it becomes us to enter, 
and in which it behooves us consistently and persever- 
ingly to walk, however few there may be found going in 
thereat. For the sure foundations of a nation's glory, and 
honor, and safety, are the vital principles of the true 
church. And it is only in the true patriotism of her 
members that there can be any guarantee for our coun- 
try's security from the danger that seems to impend over 
her through that wide gate and broad way of self-seeking 
and self-serving at and in wdiich so very many are now 
entering and rushing to her destruction! 

Finally, Freedom is the child of God, the heir of his 
virtues and his felicities, but apparently helpless and in- 
capable of coming into its legitimate inheritance, unless 
nursed by heaven, trained by order, practised by wisdom, 
and perfected by love. The Lord, in his infinite mercy, 
has given freedom to our country as a plain and ground- 
work for our church. For civil freedom must precede 
spiritual freedom, as the earth must be formed before man 
can live and do good upon it. Civil freedom is the silk- 
worm, in which lie latent moral and spiritual freedom as 
the crvsalis and the butterfly. Civil freedom is the com- 



62 A DISCOURSE ON 

moil air, in which moral freedom and spiritual freedom 
lie unseen, or gradually come, or work unobserved, as 
the electric and magnetic fluids. And it is the duty and 
the privilege of the church, as a heart and lungs, to give 
the life of heaven to the body politic. 

We are, then, incessantly to make a new declaration 
of independence. In every celebration of the birth day 
of the Father of our Country, we are to give forth a prac- 
tical commemoration of the principles involved and lu- 
minous in that true american freedom, of which he was 
the focal image and purest or truest earthly type. As 
our honored fathers declared themselves free from the 
sway of despotic natural dominion, and achieved and 
maintained their independence at every natural sacrifice ; 
so must we declare ourselves free from the sway of de- 
spotic spiritual dominion, and achieve and maintain our 
independence of that, at every spiritual sacrifice. We 
must vitally declare our independence of all that " sin 
which doth most easily beset us," and, by holding in 
bondage our true spiritual man, makes us slaves indeed! 

Let us, then, while we thank the Lord for giving us 
this natural plane to stand and work on, fail not to work 
manfully in securing all that exemption from sin — from 
selfishness — from worldlimindedness — in ourselves as 
members of the truly free church, which may prove a 
savor of life to our countrymen around us, however much 
the general mass of them may be immersed in those un- 
heavenly principles — as the ten righteous men, still found 
in Sodom, sufiiced, for a time, to ward oflf that devoted 
city's impending ruin. And while we set our faces 
against all mob-law and mobile violence — while we reso- 
lutely oppose that freedom which consists in the natural 
man's license to do as he pleases, and is licentiousness — 
while we cease not to condemn all that partizan politics 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 63 

which undermines the constitution of our country by 
making the common good secondary to private interests 
— let us so practise ourselves, and so disseminate among 
our countrymen, the heavenly principles of our Holy Je- 
rusalem, that all the world may be enabled to exclaim, 
in respect to our beloved country, " Happy is that people 
who are in such a case ! Yea, happy is that people, 
whose God is the Lord! " (Ps. cxix. 15.) 



THIS DISCOURSE 



MAY BE HAD OF 



E. FERRETT & CO. 

NO. 40 SOUTH EIGHTH STREET, PHILADELPHIA. 

As it has swelled to double the proposed size, the price 
of it, to all who have not subscribed and paid for it in 
advance, hfortij cents. 

At the same place the following books are for sale : 

SWEDENBORG'S UNIVERSAL THEOLOGY, (London Edition) $2.50 

DIVINE LOVE AND WISDOM Do. 1.50 

DIVINE PROVIDENCE Do. 1.50 

ECONOMY OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM 7 50 

PRINCIPIA 7.00 

PRINCIPLES OF CHEMISTRY 3.25 

OUTLINES OF THE INFINITE 1.62 
SPIRITUAL DIARY, VoL L, (Smithson's trans.) 2.00 

NOBLE'S PLENARY INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES 1.00 

APPEAL 100 

MASON'S JOB ABBOT 50 

DE CHARMS'S SERMONS 1 00 

TRUE GROUNDS OF NATIONAL UNION 12 

NEWCHURCHMAN, VOLS. I. & II. at $2.00 per vol. 4.00 

NEWCHURCHMAN-EXTRA, one volume of 700 pages, 2 00 
JOURNALS OF CONVENTIONS, Vol. I., in calf $2.00, in sheep $1.50 

*^* Any Books of the New Jerusalem, published in 
England, Germany, France or America, in the latin, ger- 
man, french or english languages, will be furnished to 
order. 

Mmj 18, 1850. 



DISCOURSE 



FHE TRUE NATURE 



FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. 



DKLlVEliKl) BKKORE 



T II E W A S H I N G T ON SO VI E T Y 



THE NEW JERUSALEM, 



IN VIKW ()[.' THE 



ONK HUiNDRED AND EIGHTEENTH ANNIVERSARY 



WASHINGTON'S BIRTH. 



RICHARD ]JE CHARMS, 

N I) r> II 4 1 \ I N r. Ml N 1 .> 1 K K l> V" 1 H K .\ K U' J b. K I, « A I. 1', ,\[ . 



I» 11 I h A 1) K L V U I A: 

.1. H. JONKS, I'RINTI-.I!, -U CAKTKR'S A 1,1, in 
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